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The Imperial Network
in Ancient China

This book examines the emergence of imperial state in East Asia during
the period ca. 400 BCE–200 CE as a network-based process, showing how
the geography of early interregional contacts south of the Yangzi River
informed the directions of Sinitic state expansion.
Drawing from an extensive collection of sources including transmitted
textual records, archaeological evidence, excavated legal manuscripts,
and archival documents from Liye, this book demonstrates the breadth of
human and material resources available to the empire builders of an early
imperial network throughout southern East Asia – from institutions and
infrastructures to the relationships that facilitated circulation. This net-
work is shown to have been essential to the consolidation of Sinitic impe-
rial rule in the sub-tropical zone south of the Yangzi against formidable
environmental, epidemiological, and logistical odds. This is also the first
study to explore how the interplay between an imperial network and alter-
native frameworks of long-distance interaction in ancient East Asia shaped
the political-economic trajectory of the Sinitic world and its involvement in
Eurasian globalization.
Contributing to debates around imperial state formation, the applicability
of world-system models and the comparative study of empires, The Imperial
Network in Ancient China will be of significant interest to students and
scholars of East Asian studies, archaeology, and history.

Maxim Korolkov is Assistant Professor of premodern Chinese history at

Heidelberg University and a Research Associate at the Institute of Oriental
Studies, Russian Academy of Sciences. His work focuses on the economic and
institutional change associated with the imperial state formation in ancient
and early medieval East Asia.
Routledge Studies in the Early History of Asia

1. Past Human Migrations in East Asia

Matching archaeology, linguistics and genetics
Edited by Alicia Sanchez-Mazas, Roger Blench, Malcolm D. Ross, Ilia
Peiros and Marie Lin

2. Rethinking the Prehistory of Japan

Language, genes and civilisation
Ann Kumar

3. Ancient Chinese Encyclopedia of Technology

Jun Wenren

4. Women and the Literary World in Early Modern China, 1580–1700

Daria Berg

5. Asian Expansions
The historical experiences of polity expansion in Asia
Edited by Geoff Wade

6. The Emergence of Civilizational Consciousness in Early China

History Word by Word
Uffe Bergeton

7. Cultural Astronomy of the Japanese Archipelago

Exploring the Japanese Skyscape
Akira Goto

8. The Birth of Japanese Historiography

John Bentley

9. The Imperial Network in Ancient China

The Foundation of Sinitic Empire in Southern East Asia
Maxim Korolkov
The Imperial Network
or
in Ancient China
The Foundation of Sinitic Empiree
in Southern East Asia

Maxim Korolkov
First published 2022
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group,
an informa business
© 2022 Maxim Korolkov
The right of Maxim Korolkov to be identified as author of this work
has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical,
or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including
photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval
system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks
or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and
explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book has been requested
ISBN: 978-0-367-65428-3 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-367-65429-0 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-12939-4 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003129394
Typeset in Times
by KnowledgeWorks Global Ltd.
For my parents.
Contents

List of figures x
List of tables xii
Historical periods xiii
Acknowledgments xiv

1 Introduction 1
Theoretical frameworks: Networks, world-systems,
borderlands 5
Scholarly context: New approaches to southern East Asia 8
Rise and fall of the Qin Empire: The triumph and tragedy
unnoticed? 11
Two perspectives on the Qin Empire 12
Excavated documents and their context 17
Outline of content 19

2 Before the empire: The Middle Yangzi interaction space 35

Geographical outline 36
Emergence of the Middle Yangzi interaction space 38
From interaction space to territorial state 43
Concluding remarks: Interaction, consolidation, and
expansion 52

3 Qin’s southward expansion in the Warring States period 65

An unexpected strategic turn? 66
From connectivity to conquest 66
Drive to the south: Qin arrives on the Middle Yangzi 73
Fighting Chu (mid-fourth century to 221 BCE) 75
Incorporating the conquered territories north of Yangzi 78
Concluding remarks: A long-term perspective on
empire-building 81
viii Contents
4 The Qin Empire in the south: Territoriality, organization,
challenges91
Lands old and new: Qin imperial territoriality 92
A dynamic frontier in the South 97
Administrative organization south of the Middle Yangzi 99
Challenges from within: Insurgency, unrest, and control over
populations 104
Concluding remarks: A house divided against itself? 108

5 Local administration in the south117

The You River valley on the eve of the Qin conquest 119
Territorial administration in Qianling County 121
Settlements and communities 124
Forced migrations and unfree population 129
Government spending and monetization 134
Concluding remarks: The local dimension of state power 137

6 Resources and resource exploitation145

Agricultural resources 146
Metals 155
Plants, animals, and wildlife products 157
Concluding remarks: The stuff of the empire 161

7 Southern borderlands after the Qin170

After the fall: The East Asian political space in the early
second century BCE 172
The Han reconquest of the south 180
Maturation of the imperial network: Demographic, political,
and economic geography of the early Sinitic empire in
southern East Asia 183
Concluding remarks: The imperial network and the fluctuating
contours of the Sinitic empire in the South 191

8 Epilogue: Networks, empires, world-systems:

Southern East Asia and the dynamics of early Sinitic empire204
Formation of the East Asian world-system: From imperial
network to a world-system? 205
Beyond the frontier: the transformation of semi-periphery
in southern East Asia and the dynamics of the Sinitic
world-system 209
 Contents ix
Appendix 1: Origins of individuals in Qianling County 221
Appendix 2: Grain ration records in Qianling County 227
Appendix 3: Increase in the registered population
of the southern commanderies between 2 CE and 156 CE 232
Glossary of Chinese terms 234
References 249
Index 291
Figures

1.1 Southern East Asia – the southern borderlands of the

early Sinitic empires 2
1.2 The Middle Yangzi region 4
1.3 (a) Late Warring States Qin. (b) The imperial domain
of early Western Han 13
2.1 The river systems of Hunan Province 37
2.2 The birth of the Middle Yangzi interaction space 39
2.3 Warring States Chu south of the Middle Yangzi 46
2.4 (a) The satellite image of the Warring States Chu town
at Suo. (b) Warring States-period town walls at Suo 48
3.1 Guanzhong’s early connections with the Yangzi basin 68
3.2 The Qin conquests in the Yangzi valley during the
Warring States period 74
3.3 (a) The Dan River valley at the Wu Pass. (b) The remains
of Qin fortifications at the Wu Pass 76
4.1 Old and new territories of the Qin Empire 93
4.2 Dongting Commandery 101
4.3 Garrison map (Zhujun tu) from Mawangdui tomb
no. 3 (fragment) 107
5.1 Archaeological sites in the Liye area 119
5.2 The view of the Bamianshan mountains from the
You River valley 123
5.3 The remains of the Qianling County town on the
northern bank of the You River 124
5.4 Spatial distribution of state presence in Qianling County 125
5.5 (a) Building F4 (county government office?) at the Liye site.
(b) Modern reconstruction of the building F4 127
5.6 Origins of individuals mentioned in the Qianling
County documents 131
6.1 Grain rations in Qianling County, 221–211 BCE 152
6.2 Distribution of records on the issuing of grain
rations, by date 154
 Figures xi
7.1 Western Han Empire and its southern neighbors,
ca. 195 BCE173
7.2 Registered population of the southern
commanderies, 2–156 CE185
8.1 Southern trade network in the second century CE211
Tables

1.1 Excavated Qin and early Western Han manuscripts

used in this book18
4.1 Origins of the frontier conscripts in the Yuelu Academy
ordinances  96
4.2 Service destinations for frontier conscripts in the Yuelu
Academy ordinances96
4.3 Counties of Dongting Commandery  102
5.1 Administrative geography of Qianling County123
6.1 Archaeological evidence for agricultural crops in the
Middle Yangzi (ca. 1500 BCE–ca. 200 CE)149
Historical periods

Late Neolithic
Daxi culture 4300–3300 BCE
Qujialing-Shijiahe culture 3300–2100 BCE
Liangzhu culture 3300–2300 BCE
Longshan period 2300–1800 BCE

Bronze Age
Erlitou period 1900–1600 BCE
Erligang (Zhengzhou) period (=Early Shang) 1500–1400 BCE
Huanbei period (=Middle Shang) 1350–1300 BCE

Historical periods
Late Shang (=Anyang period) 1300–1046 BCE
Western Zhou 1046–771 BCE
Eastern Zhou 771–256 BCE
Spring and Autumn 771–453 BCE
Warring States 453–221 BCE
Qin 221–207 BCE
Western Han 202 BCE – 9 CE
Xin (Wang Mang) 9–23
Eastern Han 25–220
Three Kingdoms 220–280
Western Jin 280–316
Eastern Jin 317–420
Northern and Southern Dynasties 420–589
Sui 589–618
Tang 618–907
Acknowledgments

This book grew out of one of the chapters of my doctoral project. I am pro-
foundly grateful to my advisor at Columbia University, Professor Li Feng,
and to the participants on my dissertation committee, Professors Guo Jue,
Richard Von Glahn, Robin D.S. Yates, and Madeleine Zelin, for their ded-
icated guidance and many valuable comments on early drafts. I am par-
ticularly thankful to Professor Guo for sharing the results of her ongoing
research about the early history of complex societies in the Middle Yangzi
region, applies a region-based approach to understanding polity-building in
ancient East Asia. I owe my admittedly limited GIS skills to the organizers
and instructors of the “Mapping for the Urban Humanities,” an intensive
workshop on digital mapping hosted by Columbia University and spon-
sored by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, which I had the privilege of
attending in Spring and Summer 2017.
At Heidelberg University, where I have held a teaching appointment since
2017, I am most grateful to Professor Enno Giele for his friendship, support,
and many enlightening conversations in his office during the lunch breaks at
the university Mensa, and in the trains on the way to and from various schol-
arly events. The colleagues on our small Early China team at the Institute of
Chinese Studies at Heidelberg created a unique atmosphere of warm hospi-
tality and intellectual camaraderie. I am particularly thankful to Sun Hui,
Nanny Kim, Thies Staack, Chun Fung Tong, and Jeanette Werning.
Some of this research has been presented and discussed at confer-
ences and workshops, including, in the summer of 2019, the symposium
“Representations of Qin Empire” at Oxford, co-hosted by Christopher
Foster and Anke Hein; the workshop “Cumulative Chinese Culture and
the Study of Early China,” organized by Armin Selbitschka and Yitzchak
Jaffe at the University of Munich; and, later the same year, two conferences
focused on cross-regional interactions in ancient Eurasia, “Economies of
the Edge: Frontier Zone Processes at Regional, Imperial, and Global Scales
(300 BCE–300 CE),” convened by Sitta von Reden and the “BaSaR: Beyond
the Silk Road” project team at the University of Freiburg; and “Before the
Silk Road: Eurasian Interactions in the First Millennium BC,” organized
by Lianming Wang at Heidelberg University.
 Acknowledgments xv
While I wrote different parts of the present book between 2017 and 2021,
much of the underlying work, including field trips in the Middle Yangzi
valley, Sichuan, and other places in the southern part of China, was car-
ried out from 2011 onward. I am incredibly grateful to the many scholars
in China who helped me put together and then fulfill these travel plans,
some of which extended to relatively inaccessible areas (transportation con-
ditions have improved considerably since). This list is not exhaustive, and
I sincerely apologize for any inadvertent omissions: Chen Wei 陳偉, Fang
Qin 方勤, Guan Yu 關宇, Hu Xinsheng 胡新生, Jia Fei 賈飛, Jian Fei 簡斐,
Jiang Feifei 蔣非非, Liu Yong 劉勇, Long Jingsha 龍京沙, Long Peiran 龍裴
然, Shi Tao 石濤, Xu Shaohua 徐少華, Zhang Chunlong 張春龍, and Zheng
Wei 鄭威.
My special thanks go to the friends and colleagues who read and com-
mented on the complete draft of this book: Erica Fox Brindley and Arina
Mikhalevskaya, who provided thoughtful comments on individual chapters;
and especially Anke Hein, who took time from her research work, teach-
ing, and childrearing for a thorough review of the entire manuscript. Her
criticism and suggestions helped me to improve the book substantially. All
remaining mistakes, inaccuracies, and omissions are my sole responsibility.
Besides the physical and intellectual isolation enforced by the continu-
ing pandemic, access to university libraries from the second half of 2020
and until today has remained contingent on the hard-to-predict schedules
of official lockdowns. Under these conditions, resource-sharing among the
peer group has become a sine qua non of ongoing research work. My grat-
itude extends to Jordan Christopher, Guo Jue, Jiang Feifei, Lei Hailong
雷海龍, Lin Zhipeng 林志鵬, Ling Wenchao 凌文超, and many other schol-
ars and friends.
Lastly, I would never have completed this book without the help and sup-
port of my family, with whom I spent more time after the outset of travel
restrictions last year than I had since leaving home in 2008. To them, I owe
my greatest and unpayable debt.
1 Introduction

The Qin Empire lasted less than fifteen years (221–207 BCE), yet its legacy
shaped not only the administrative, legal, and economic institutions but
also the geographical contours of the imperial states in mainland East Asia
for millennia to come. In the north, it consolidated fortifications against
the steppe pastoralists into a continuous defense line along the ecological
divide between the East Asian agricultural zone and the semi-arid grass-
lands of continental Eurasia. In the south, the Qin armies crossed the
Yangzi River, advanced across Hunan toward the Nanling Mountains and
invaded Lingnan (lit. “to the south of [Nanling] Mountains”), a vast trop-
ical region that encompassed present-day Guangdong Province and the
Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region of China as well as the northern part
of Vietnam. In the southwest, an imperial stronghold was established at the
fringe of the Yunnan-Guizhou plateau.
From the perspective of Qin and Han (202 BCE–220 CE) imperial
centers, these territories of southern East Asia constituted the borderlands,
a culturally and politically contested zone that intermittently fell under the
control of imperial centers in the north or broke away to become an arena
of indigenous state formation and long-distance engagements with peoples
and regions beyond the geographical horizons of the empires. For the pur-
pose of the present study but also more generally, it can be subdivided into
four physiographic regions: Hunan (in the literal meaning of this toponym,
“south of the lake(s)”), which comprised the basins of the major southern
tributaries of the Middle Yangzi in the present-day Hunan and Jiangxi
provinces; the Lower Yangzi; Lingnan, a vast territory to the south of
Nanling Mountains, which encompassed the present-day Guangdong and
Guangxi regions of China as well as the northern part of Vietnam; and the
southwestern highlands (see Figure 1.1). The Minyue region (present-day
Fujian Province) along the East and South China Sea coasts between the
Yangzi and Pearl River estuaries, mountainous and inaccessible due to the
lack of navigable rivers connecting it to neighboring regions, was largely
unaffected by the Sinitic expansion during the early imperial era, despite
episodic incursions by the empire’s forces.1

DOI: 10.4324/9781003129394-1
2 Introduction

Figure 1.1 Southern East Asia – the southern borderlands of the early Sinitic empires.

For the early imperial governments in Xianyang, Chang’an, and

Luoyang – and for the students of Chinese history today – territories to the
south of Yangzi formed the periphery within the circumscribed imperial
space that possessed a well-defined center, the capital city with the emper-
or’s court and government, and the core region, whose human and material
resources were available for exploitation by that government.2 However,
this imperial space was not the sole arena for the economic, cultural, mil-
itary, and other interactions of the southern populations, which simulta-
neously participated in other webs of interaction that had no uncontested
centers and whose geography challenged incorporation by a single politi-
cal regime. These networks, variously defined as Zomia,3 the South China
Sea network,4 and the Southeast Asian Maritime Zone (SEAMZ),5 shared
important elements of social organization, material culture, and sym-
bolic expression of political legitimacy, which facilitated and stimulated
long-distance exchanges.
By diverting resources from the empire’s political economy and pro-
viding refuge to emperors’ fleeing subjects,6 these acephalous interaction
spaces were potential competitors to the centralized imperial network, the
structures for the circulation of materials, goods, people, and knowledge
that directed these resources toward state goals and relied on the state for
security, organization, and maintenance. At the peak of their power, Sinitic
empires sought to expand their southern borderlands along interregional
communication routes in order to control or regulate, usually by diplomacy
 Introduction 3
but sometimes through military intervention, the economic and political
interactions among the local communities, making them part of the impe-
rial network.7 This expansion was partly informed by considerations of stra-
tegic security – uncontrolled borderlands could turn into bases for raiders or
for formation of hostile polities – but also by the imperial rulers’ and elites’
desire to tap into the conduits of long-range circulation of valuable strate-
gic and prestige goods: metals, horses, pearls, fragrant woods, rhinoceros
horns, feathers, and, somewhat later, spices and Buddhist relics.8 According
to the standard narrative of Chinese history, the Qin and Han “drive to the
South” in the latter third and second centuries BCE was the opening, and
crucial, stage in the Sinitic imperial “march toward the tropics.”9
This book argues that Sinitic empire-building was informed by the geo-
graphic configuration of interaction spaces long before the “unification” of
continental East Asia in 221 BCE, and that the Qin’s location at the inter-
stice between a number of crucial networks, including the Yangzi world, is
the key to understand its conquests. I see the empire as yet another type of
interaction web, connecting people and communities across long distances
and offering them unique and important advantages to be drawn from par-
ticipation, rather than as an oppressive redistributive regime imposed on
the populations of outlying regions by force for the benefit of metropolitan
elites – even though violence and redistribution did play crucial roles in the
functioning of the empire. This understanding informs my analysis of the
ebbs and flows of Sinitic imperial rule south of the Yangzi between the third
century BCE and the third century CE. I also believe that the approach pro-
posed in the present study is applicable generally to the analysis of imperial
systems and their relationship to other forms of political, economic, and
cultural integration.
The book’s concern with the “foundations” of Sinitic empires in the
South has chronological and geographical implications. Although some
of its chapters are set in times as early as the Neolithic and as late as the
medieval era, and deal with the regions as far north as the Central Plains of
northern China and as far south as the maritime world of the South China
Sea, its main focus is on the relatively brief period of Qin expansion to the
south of Yangzi in the late third century BCE and its immediate aftermath.
The geographic focus is on the region of the Middle Yangzi (see Figure 1.2),
which during this crucial period served as the bridgehead for the southward
expansion of the Qin Empire, and in the following centuries, constituted
the logistical, administrative, economic, and military backbone of imperial
control south of the Yangzi.
By early medieval times, various regional warlords came to view this
region, by then administratively consolidated as Jingzhou Province, as
the key to the reunification of the empire.10 The establishment of the polit-
ical center of the southern empires (also known as the Southern Dynasties
or the Six Dynasties, 220–589 CE) in the Lower Yangzi valley marked an
important departure from the geographic configuration, institutions, and
4 Introduction

Figure 1.2 The Middle Yangzi region.

policies of the early pan-East Asian empires of Qin and Han, and new ways
of engaging with non-imperial networks in the South. These topics will be
elaborated on at the end of this book.
Before I proceed with the outline of the conceptual and theoretical frame-
works of this study, its scholarly context, its sources and methodology,
and its structure, a brief note is due in regard to the wording of its title. I
intentionally avoid the conventional reference to ancient East Asian pol-
ities, including the Qin and Han empires, as “Chinese,” to prevent giving
the impression of a coherent, stable ethnic or cultural identity shared by
these societies and ancestral to that of the present-day state of China.11 Not
only is such a representation anachronistic and embedded in a teleological
narrative of nation-building, it is also undermined by the central argument
of the present study, which is that, in the centuries around the beginning
of the common era, the empire was only one of many interaction networks
available to the populations in East Asia, and that their participation in this
network, and the political and cultural identities generated through their
participation, were volatile and contingent on the changing characteristics
of the network. The alternative adopted throughout this book, “Sinitic,”
has linguistic and literary connotations, particularly referring to the writing
system used by the elites and administrators of East Asian states during the
period under consideration, and to the canon of texts that came to define
high culture in this part of the world during the first millennium BCE.12
 Introduction 5
In this sense, the compound “Sinitic empire” applies to expansive polities
that used Sinitic script in their operations and claimed military dominance
of the subcontinent, with no further implications for the ethno-cultural
identities and political loyalties of these polities’ subjects.
My use of “southern East Asia” for the lands to the south of Yangzi River
is purely heuristic and, unlike the abovementioned concepts of Zomia,
SEAMZ, etc., does not purport to mean any kind of economic, cultural,
or other affinity among the societies within this geographical space, nor
any shared path of historical development. While some of the important
interaction networks addressed in the book were primarily distributed in
this zone, others crossed its boundaries, including the Middle Yangzi region
that is in the focus of much of the present study. The key reason I use this
terminological shortcut for the otherwise extremely diverse societies south
of the Yangzi is that “southern East Asia” was the primary arena for Sinitic
imperial expansion in the south during the period under consideration. Yet
the spatial definition of “southern borderlands” is just as problematic as
the chronological definition of the Sinitic empire: as it is debatable which
event signaled the emergence of a new, imperial polity in East Asia,13 so is
the geographical line that in various periods separated the “heartland” of
the Sinitic ecumene from the surrounding regions. In fact, this study casts
doubt on the usefulness of misleadingly clear-cut delimitations of “cores,”
“peripheries,” “borderlands,” etc. until relatively late in the formation process
of a centralized imperial network, when such terms become more meaning-
ful. I address this issue in the following section.

Theoretical frameworks: Networks, world-systems, borderlands

This book explores imperial-state formation from the network perspective,
as a process embedded in the longstanding interactions among communities
in continental East Asia linked by cultural, economic, and political-military
ties.14 The centrality of different nodes in this web changed over time as new
groups joined, interactions intensified, and the properties of the network
evolved. In adopting this perspective, I seek to decentralize the imperial
narrative intrinsically focused on the agency of one expanding polity and
the actions of its representatives – rulers, politicians, diplomats, and com-
manders: a narrative that highlights hierarchies between conquerors and
conquered, capital and provinces, and core and periphery. Some elements
of this narrative are impossible to eschew. No story of Qin Empire-building
can be told without mentioning the First Emperor (the “unifier” of the Sinitic
world), Shang Yang (the architect of Qin administrative, legal and economic
institutions) or Bai Qi (the commander who led Qin armies to key victories
in the third century BCE),15 or without references to state actions, such as
conquests, coerced resettlement, and the construction of roads and canals.
The empires of Qin and Han are the protagonists in the present study.
At the same time, it demonstrates that Sinitic empire-building was a
6 Introduction
fundamentally network-based process. Territorial expansion was informed
by interregional connectivity. The conquest of every new region was an
engagement in new webs of interaction that shaped the range of geographi-
cal opportunities, economic incentives, and strategic modalities that defined
the decisions of imperial actors. I further argue that, far from being a mere
parasitic superstructure imposed on existing exchange networks, exploiting
them for the benefit of its rulers, elites, or core regions,16 the empire consti-
tuted a new type of interaction network with a considerable ability to adapt
to the interests and needs of various participants – ruling elites, but also
aspiring sub-elites and even the general populace, not only in the political
center but also in outlying regions and even in the contested borderlands.
This is not the same as saying that everyone ended up better off. Empires
had costs for their subjects, and empire-building was often a violent busi-
ness. Since the early Sinitic (and other) empires never succeeded in becom-
ing the sole point of reference for the identity construction of their subjects
and allies, nor the single available framework to structure these people’s
economic, cultural, or even political-military transactions, participants in
imperial networks always had the option to withdraw, fully or partly, and
join or intensify their participation in alternative, nonimperial interactions.
At some critical junctures, e.g., at the end of East Asian antiquity and the
beginning of the medieval era (late second to sixth centuries CE), such tran-
sitions involved very large segments of the imperial network, resulting in
its disintegration – temporary, in this particular case – and reordering on a
new basis.
The liberal application of world-systems model to various kinds of inter-
societal interactions across a wide range of territorial scales, from local to
global, and to transactions ranging from military conflicts to routinized
trade in bulk commodities, has invited criticism on theoretical, methodo-
logical, and evidentiary grounds.17 While proponents of the broad interpre-
tation of world-systems have sought to develop an encompassing definition
to account for long-distance, rare and irregular exchanges of prestige
goods as well as for more intensive connections within regional “mini-­
systems,”18 other scholars argue that “recourse to the world-systems model
to understand these interconnections has been misleading and employed
anachronistically.”19
Yet others hold the middle ground, drawing distinction between the
world-systems theory and world-systems analysis, and defining the latter
as a perspective, rather than a theory or a model, focused on empirical
questions, such as the relations between areas with different qualities and
the ways these relations change the expansion or disruption of polities; the
possibility of determining their hierarchical relations or uneven terms of
exchange; characteristics of exchange goods; characteristics of borders and
frontiers; and the formation and transformation of identities.20 Despite their
use of Wallersteinian vocabulary (e.g., cores, peripheries, and semi-periph-
eries), these scholars tend to (tacitly or not) recognize that in practice they
 Introduction 7
often deal with different types of overlapping exchange networks, which in
most cases did not share a single core, had volatile geographical configura-
tions, and did not necessarily converge into a “world-economy.”21
This book describes interregional connectivity in pre-imperial East Asia
in interactionist, network terms, which are less laden with implications
than the world-systems terminology. At the same time, I find the world-­
economy and world-empire models useful for analyzing the transformation
of East Asian interaction space as the imperial network emerged during the
last three decades of the third century BCE, and the formation of the East
Asian economic core as the result of the Qin-Han transition, which was
completed in about the 120s BCE. I have previously argued that changes in
the organization of state finance and administration in the late third and
second centuries BCE had a profound impact on the relationship between
the imperial government and local elites, the expansion of markets,
and empire-wide economic integration.22 Here I will try to demonstrate
that these processes were also conducive to the crystallization of world-­
economy properties in the interaction networks of continental East Asia
and surrounding regions.
The concepts of “peripheries,” “margins,” “borderlands,” “frontiers,”
and other terms characterizing world-economic spatiality are central to
the world-systems discourse and, more generally, to the analysis of large-
scale social systems, including empires. Catchphrases like “the advantages
of backwardness” have been used to describe the semi-periphery’s abil-
ity to generate new institutional forms, create new centers of power, and
transform world-systems.23 Postcolonial studies of imperialism emphasize
the role of imperial borderlands as crucial loci of identity-making and
community-imagining, birthplaces of new forms of authority and eco-
nomic operation, and sources of challenge to existing norms and ways of
thinking.24 Similarly, post-processual archaeologists’ focus on the inter-
actions among multiple modes of practice and discourse has sparked an
interest in borders, frontiers, and boundaries and fostered an awareness
that topographies of different activities (political, economic, ritual, etc.)
do not necessarily coincide,25 even though the consolidation of political
networks – the states – often results in the domination of various activities
by one center.26
This remarkable consensus about the multiplicity and noncoincidence
of overlapping interaction networks, and the centrality of margins and
borderlands in the processes of polity-building, economic change, and
identity construction, is increasingly shared by the students of ancient East
Asia.27 While most of the world-systemic and network-based analysis has
so far been concerned with the northern and northwestern (“Eurasian”)
connections of ancient China,28 recent years have witnessed a surge of
interest in the people and cultures of southern East Asia, their place in
Sinitic empire-building, and their interactions outside and beyond the
Sinosphere.
8 Introduction
Scholarly context: New approaches to southern East Asia
In a book published almost seventy years ago, Herold J. Wiens observed
that the northern frontiers historically commanded much more research
attention than the southern, due to their perceived significance for the fate
of China.29 Insofar as the late imperial period (1368–1911) is concerned,
this statement no longer holds true. Recent scholarship has paid consider-
able attention to the southwestern peripheries of the Ming (1368–1644) and
Qing (1644–1912) empires, which encompassed the present-day provinces of
Yunnan and Guizhou and parts of Sichuan, Hunan, Guangxi, and Tibet.
Researchers have explored the imperial government’s efforts to demarcate
and categorize local populations, consolidate control over indigenous ter-
ritories, exploit their economic resources, and project military power while
keeping the cost of occupation low.30
Over the past few decades, archaeological excavations in the southern
provinces of China and in Southeast Asia have dramatically transformed the
foundations for the study of earlier periods.31 Two recent studies offer novel
perspectives on the early middle period (ca. 200–ca. 750 CE) and propose
interpretive frameworks resonating with this book. Catherine Churchman’s
The People Between the Rivers: The Rise and Fall of a Bronze Drum Culture,
200–750 CE is a study of the indigenous upland societies to the west of the
Pearl River Delta, which was part of the greater Lingnan region conquered
by the Han Empire at the end of the second century BCE.32 Three hundred
years later, the local populations, generically referred to as Li and Lao in
the Sinitic sources, still maintained political autonomy and a culture dis-
tinct from the imperial authorities and Sinitic populations settled in the
alluvial valleys and along the sea rim. Far from assimilation into the impe-
rial society and lifestyles, trade with the lowland centers stimulated con-
solidation of power and wealth in the Li-Lao chiefdoms, which engaged in
polity-building, symbolic display, and conspicuous consumption embedded
in the preexisting traditions of highland and coastal Southeast Asia. While
Churchman’s study concentrates on a specific region, it highlights some cru-
cial features of the southern borderlands, such as discontinuous territorial-
ity of the state33 and the multiplicity of interaction networks, some of which
contributed to the hinterland’s economic integration into the empire, while
other challenged state control over the flow of wealth, construction of iden-
tity, and political and cultural expression.34 These imperial and nonimperial
networks were not mutually exclusive, and individual or group participation
in them was negotiable.
A macrohistory of southern East Asia during the early medieval period
is presented in Andrew Chittick’s The Jiankang Empire in Chinese and
World History.35 His “Jiankang Empire” (the newly coined term for the
more conventional historiographic category of Six Dynasties, a sequence
of empires that controlled most of the Yangzi basin and regions to the
south between 220 and 589 CE), also, and aptly, called the Sino-Southeast
 Introduction 9
Asian zone, largely coincides with the “southern East Asia” of this book.
One of Chittick’s key contributions is a new perspective on the southern
empires. He argues that, from many viewpoints, the “Jiankang Empire”
is much more akin to the contemporaneous sea-based, trading polities of
Southeast Asia than to the Sinitic empires of either the early imperial (Qin
and Han) standard or early medieval Sino-nomadic synthesis (including
the Sui and Tang empires that “reunified” mainland East Asia in the late
sixth and early seventh centuries CE).36 The present study endorses and
elaborates this conclusion by exploring the position of southern East Asia
at the intersection of multiple interaction spaces on the eve of the imperial
era, its transformation into the semi-periphery of a world-empire under the
Qin and Han, and into the new world-system after the decline of the early
Sinitic empire.
The South’s importance in the politics, economy, and culture of the
Sinitic empires long before the opening of the Grand Canal (in the late sixth
century CE) is increasingly recognized by scholars of Chinese history.37 At
the same time, the early stages of Sinitic expansion to the south of Yangzi
are still sometimes presented as China’s manifest destiny. According to
this narrative, in the North the early empires were confronted by power-
ful nomadic enemies and an inhospitable environment, but in the South, a
demographic and economic void naturally invited the industrious, techno-
logically equipped northern immigrants to fill this underpopulated, under-
developed landscape and exploit its mineral and biotic cornucopia. Lacking
in social cohesion and large-scale military organization, its populations
were, it is claimed, incapable of putting up an efficient resistance against the
relentless pressure from the north.38
These representations are increasingly challenged by the mounting evi-
dence of populous, politically sophisticated and technologically advanced
societies in the Yangzi basin as early as the fourth and third millennia BCE39
and the blossoming of indigenous Bronze Age cultures in the second mil-
lennium.40 Some of these developments are addressed in Chapter 2 of this
book. In the first millennium BCE, the Middle Yangzi region became the
base of the state of Chu, which for centuries competed for hegemony in
the Sinitic world on a par with its powerful northern rivals.41 Further to the
south, enormous urban center at Cổ Loa in the Red River Delta, previously
thought of as the product of the Han-era (202 BCE–220 CE) colonization,
has been archaeologically dated to the pre-conquest period, bringing to the
forefront the story of local development rather than of Sinicization.42 Even
after the formal incorporation of southern East Asia into the Han Empire,
many of the population movements and cultural changes were defined by
dynamics within rather than outside of the region.43
Erica Fox Brindley’s Ancient China and the Yue: Perceptions and Identities
on the Southern Frontier, c. 400 BCE – 50 CE is a major recent contribu-
tion to our understanding of the interconnected history of the South China,
Southeast Asia, and Oceania macro-sphere from the Neolithic through the
10 Introduction
age of ancient empires.44 Brindley doubts the historical validity of bounded
linguistic and ethno-cultural entities such as Yue or Huaxia, seeing these as
the projections of the present-day national imaginations. Rather, linguistic
and archaeological continuities in the southern China/Southeast Asia com-
plex point to fluid identities, heterogeneous communities, and interactions
that crossed the group boundaries drawn in ancient texts and in modern
nationalist historiographies.45 The contours of these interaction spaces were
defined by riverine and maritime routes that facilitated their convergence
into the two main networks of interaction: coastal and highland.46 When
the agents of Sinitic polities and, somewhat later, Sinitic authors encoun-
tered these interaction spaces, they sought to make sense of the seeming
contrast between their political fragmentation and the shared lifestyles of
their populations by applying general exonyms, constructing genealogies,
and conjuring environmental-deterministic theories, while at the same time
insisting on the cultural inferiority of the indigenes.47 These narratives even-
tually contributed to the essentialization of the “southern frontier” as the
other of the imperial Sinitic matrix: offering escape from administrative
control and fiscal extraction, with an illiterate, mobile, and opportunistic
populations.
Like Churchman and Chittick, Brindley challenges the Sinocentric view
of the people of southern East Asia. Yet the empire, its agents and policies
play a crucial role in all three stories. Interaction with the imperial enclaves
on the coast and in the river valleys spurred political consolidation, eco-
nomic intensification, and cultural creativity among Churchman’s “people
between the rivers.”48 The imperial Sinitic repertoire of legitimation was
one of the key institutional and cultural resources of Chittick’s “Jiankang
Empire.”49 This empire’s idiosyncratic southern qualities are thrown into
the spotlight vis-à-vis the Han and the northern Sino-nomadic regimes
that eventually claimed the universalist Han heritage.50 The interaction
networks of Brindley’s “southern China/Southeast Asia complex” became
“Yue” and the “southern frontier” as the result of Sinitic state expansion
and the concomitant articulation of the Sinitic self “as a central, primary,
and normative agent in relationship to a peripheral, secondary, and pecu-
liar (or morally deviant) other.”51
Understanding ancient southern East Asia on its own terms, there-
fore, requires a reassessment of its populations’ encounters with Sinitic
empire-building. Far from being a one-time conquest followed by inevita-
ble acculturation into Sinitic civilization, this process involved a reconfig-
uration of long-distance interactions, the transformation of interregional
connectivity and a renegotiation of terms of participation in economic and
political relations. The Qin presided over some important new develop-
ments that contributed to the region’s integration into the new, centralized
type of network, the empire. However, the Qin conquest did not seal the
fate of southern East Asia, nor is the conquest alone sufficient to explain the
region’s trajectory over the following centuries.
 Introduction 11
Rise and fall of the Qin Empire: The triumph
and tragedy unnoticed?
The contrast between the short life of the first Sinitic empire, which barely
outlasted its charismatic founder, the August Thearch (better known in the
English-language literature as the First Emperor of Qin, r. 246–210 BCE,
of which 221–210 BCE as an emperor), and the longevity of its legacy did
not escape the attention of the following generations of political thinkers.52
To modern scholars, the Qin presents an ideal case of a systemic collapse
precipitated by the excessive centralization of sociopolitical structures.53
Yet the image of an overcentralized, violent and consequently unsustain-
able empire, a historical curiosity with the messianic figure of the First
Emperor at the helm, may well be a product of Qin’s extraordinarily efficient
propaganda, which was subsequently perpetuated in the historiographic
tradition.54
In political debates of the Han era, the singling out of the rise and espe-
cially the fall of Qin as epoch-making events was largely due to their role
as illustrations of the ultimate destructiveness of the central government’s
proactive policies, the key target of political criticism during and after the
reign of Emperor Wu (Wu-di, 141–87 BCE).55 The Qin attempts to regulate
intellectual discourse and private circulation of texts, though probably not
as radical as claimed by the famous story of the burning of books and bury-
ing of scholars, must have also contributed to its negative image in the eyes
of the educated elite and, consequently, to their gloating over the contrast
between the triumph and tragedy of the Qin Empire.56
Contemporary private documents, on the contrary, do not focus on Qin
unification or the Qin fall as momentous turning points. A private chronicle
drafted around 217 BCE, excavated from the tomb of a Qin clerk, records
the crucial political events of the age, such as the Qin attack on Handan, the
capital of the rival state of Zhao, in 257 BCE, and the death of the ruler of the
state of Han, in 226 BCE. It makes no single entry for 221 BCE, apparently
“a year of no significance” for the text author.57 Other private chronicles list
events starting from the reign of the Qin king Zhaoxiang (Zhaoxiang Wang,
306–251 BCE) through the early decades of the Western Han Empire.58
Neither the change in the Qin royal title in 221 BCE, nor the reign of the
First Emperor, nor the fall of the Qin Empire appear to have been consid-
ered as critical watersheds at the beginning of the Western Han.59
These and other excavated documents highlight important structural
continuities across the conventional historiographic divide between the
pre-imperial and imperial eras. Notwithstanding the bombastic rhetoric of
the Qin Emperor’s propaganda, the “unification” of 221 BCE did not erad-
icate political division and armed conflict within the East Asian ecumene
(see Chapter 4 in this book). Centralized control of the territories that the
Qin occupied during the final decade of the Warring States period (453–221
BCE) remained precarious through the short lifespan of the empire. It was
12 Introduction
severely compromised by the local resistance and animosity toward the Qin
rule on the part of the surviving old elites.
The imperial authorities struggled to establish an efficient administra-
tion in the “new territories,” which included the recently founded provinces
south of the Yangzi. A fortified, garrisoned frontier was needed to guard the
old Qin domains against incursions from what was officially another part of
the empire. In effect, the Qin rulers had to recognize their inability to elim-
inate the competing claimants to the human and material resources in the
conquered regions. The disintegration of the Qin Empire in 210–207 BCE
was accompanied by the revival of the multistate world that had formally
terminated just ten years earlier. This geopolitical configuration, which was
essentially a continuation of the Warring States period, endured for almost
a century after the fall of Qin (see Figure 1.3a, b).
This does not mean, however, that this first and brief round of imperial
expansion failed to exert a long-lasting influence on southern East Asia. It
opened up new perspectives and opportunities for all those involved: for the
imperial rulers, to tap new resources and trade networks and to reinforce
their claim to universal overlordship; for local elites, to consolidate control
of their societies and to accumulate material wealth and symbolic capital by
participating in the political and economic structures of the empire; and for
the general populace, to improve living conditions through access to new
production technologies and exchange practices. Once their potential had
been revealed, these opportunities could not be easily disregarded, although
their practical realization was open to a multitude of local solutions.

Two perspectives on the Qin Empire

This book pursues two perspectives on the early history of Sinitic empires
in the South. Half of the chapters focus on the organization and functioning
of the Qin state in the newly conquered lands to the south of Yangzi, specif-
ically in the exceptionally well-documented Yuan River valley in the west
of present-day Hunan Province (see Figure 1.2). Others explore the broader
background of Qin’s southward expansion, particularly the impact of inter-
regional connectivity in East Asia on the process of empire-building in the
latter half of the first millennium BCE.
Neither of these two perspectives is new in itself. The discovery and
exploration of the Neolithic and Bronze Age cultures of the Yangzi valley,
Lingnan, and the highlands of southwestern China in the latter decades of
the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first century not only
toppled the monocentric paradigm of the origins of Chinese civilization in
the Central Plains of northern China but also upgraded the South’s position
in the study of early empires.60 This was largely due to the mass discovery
of ancient documents in the Yangzi basin, which made the South the only
place where this process could be investigated in detail.61 The geographical
bias in the distribution of documentary sources accidentally contributed to
 Introduction 13

Figure 1.3 (a) Late Warring States Qin. (b) The imperial domain of early Western
Han.
14 Introduction
the increasing awareness among Early China scholars of the centrality of
margins in the formation of the imperial state.62
Despite the brevity and limitations of its pan-East Asian rule, the Qin
Empire greatly affected the historical trajectories of the Sinitic world and
its neighbors. The power of Qin influence can be partly explained by the
extraordinary activism of its government, which, starting in the mid-­Warring
States period, engaged in comprehensive social engineering and state man-
agement of the economy.63 The government’s role was particularly salient
in the recently conquered frontier regions, where it organized agricultural
colonization and infrastructure-building, founded new settlements, reshuf-
fled communities, and created new industries and markets. This dynamic
political-economic regime proved capable of exerting a profound influence
on local societies within a relatively short period.
Outside of the Qin heartland in the Wei River basin, these proactive pol-
icies are best documented in the two regions that constituted the southern
frontier of Qin state during the late Warring States period, the Sichuan basin
and the Jianghan plain to the north of Middle Yangzi. In manuscript- and
archaeology-driven studies of the Qin Empire-building, the incorporation
of these two regions came to be considered as the formative imperial expe-
rience, a giant experiment in population management, resource extraction,
acculturation, and assimilation.64 For some scholars, the Qin conquest of the
Sichuan basin in 316 BCE marked the true beginning of the Qin Empire.65
For the first time in history, a polity based in the Yellow River basin estab-
lished direct administrative control over part of the Yangzi valley.
The disadvantage of such proactive governance was its high transaction
costs. The recently excavated official Qin documents reveal an enormous vol-
ume of legal regulation, monitoring, and communication involved in quo-
tidian administrative operations. As the Qin state expanded during the late
fourth and the third centuries BCE, so did the logistical constraints on the
efficiency of its bureaucratic government and command economy. Miyake
Kiyoshi and others studied the Qin system of military supply as reflected in
the excavated documents of Qianling County in western Hunan, and argued
that transportation expenses contributed to the excessive exploitation of
conscript labor, financial exhaustion, a highly uneven distribution of state
presence across the landscape, and, effectively, to the collapse of the Qin
administration.66 Research on official communication at the empire’s south-
ern frontier has revealed inefficiencies and disruptions in the conveying of
documents between administrative units and highlighted the problems of
intensive monitoring in the Qin bureaucratic apparatus.67
Combined with the Qin government’s preoccupation with direct, unmedi-
ated control of local communities and resources, these logistical constraints
severely restricted the extent of territory where centralized administration
could be efficiently carried out.68 Like many other ancient empires outside their
compact territorial cores, the Qin was spread thinly along the transportation
and communication corridors that connected enclaves of state control planted
 Introduction 15
in the provinces.69 Far from being a continuous territorial monolith, it was a
network of what the political scientist James C. Scott calls the “state spaces,”
the pockets of territory “amenable to state control and appropriation” due to
their topographic features – flat land as opposed to the surrounding rugged
terrain – and accessibility by water or, less typically, overland routes.70
If the state could intervene efficiently in the socioeconomic life of outlying
regions only within limited territorial enclaves, then the perimeters of each
such zone were also frontiers that could contract, implode, or expand. These
dynamics were largely informed by official policies, which could facilitate or
impede the integration of the surrounding hinterland into the state spaces.
Equally important was the relationship between the imperial networks of
administration, taxation, and military logistics, on the one hand, and the pat-
terns of long-distance connectivity underlying the empire-building process.
The Qin expansion in the south unfolded against the background of
longstanding interregional contacts. By the beginning of the Eastern Zhou
(771–221 BCE), when the Qin polity relocated to the Guanzhong (“Within
the Passes”) region in the middle and lower Wei River plain, populations
in this region had a long history of interaction with the communities in the
upper Han River valley (Hanzhong) south of the Qinling Mountains (see
Figure 1.2).71 Hanzhong was part of the Yangzi basin, where navigable rivers
facilitated human movement, circulation of technology, and dissemination of
artistic styles, all of which considerably intensified during the Bronze Age.72
During the Warring States period, the great powers of the Sinitic world
were stepping in to consolidate their political, economic, and administra-
tive control over these networks. The states of Qin and Chu sought to carve
out their zones of influence in the geographical interfaces of the northwest-
ern highlands and the Yangzi basin, and eventually clashed at the end of the
fourth century BCE. In the course of the resulting scramble for territory,
centuries-old webs of interaction were integrated within a few decades into
one or the other of the two rival polities.73
The conquest of Sichuan and the advance down the Han River valley,
culminating in the destruction of the Chu capital in 278 BCE, not only made
Qin the key power in the Yangzi basin but also defined the directions for its
further expansion to the south and southwest. The Middle Yangzi was the
hub of multiple interaction spaces, including the Sinitic states in the north;
riverine and coastal networks of Austronesian and Tai-Kadai-speaking
people south of the River, collectively known as Yue in the Sinitic sources;74
and highland societies in the Yunnan-Guizhou plateau. In the late second
and the first millennium BCE, the latter two networks, which can be traced
back to the late Neolithic period,75 were gradually converging. This process
was probably to some degree associated with the transmission of bronze
metallurgy from the north Eurasian grasslands along the rim of the Tibetan
plateau into Yunnan and Southeast Asia.76
By the middle of the first millennium BCE, the Lower Yangzi in the east,
the Red River Delta in the south and the Yunnan Central Lakes basin in the
16 Introduction
southwest can be seen as the corners of a roughly triangular zone of cultural
contact among compatible, relatively small scale but increasingly centraliz-
ing and warlike polities. The main connectivity lines within this zone ran
along the Yangzi and its southern tributaries, particularly the Xiang and
Yuan Rivers, which provided outlets to Lingnan and the Yunnan-Guizhou
plateau (for a more detailed discussion, see Chapter 2 in this book); the Red
River connecting the Bac Bo plain in northern Vietnam and the central
regions of Yunnan77; and the Pacific coast between the Yangzi and the Red
River estuaries.78 The geography of discoveries of the so-called Dong Son
bronze drums and containers (often referred to as situlae or buckets) from
the first millennium BCE and in the early centuries CE may point at the
common elements of ritual culture, aristocratic identity and, more specu-
latively, at the elite group alliances enacted through such shared rituals.79
It is important to point out that each of the constituent regions in this
extensive geographical space – which in the later third and second centuries
BCE constituted the southern borderlands of the early Sinitic empires – was
part of even broader webs of long-distance interactions. The southwestern
highlands connected to the pastoralist world of Inner Eurasia in the north
and to the Indian Ocean in the south.80 The “Yue lands” were open to mar-
itime interactions across the South China Sea, which also involved substan-
tial parts of the Southeast Asian hinterland.81
For the emerging empire, military and administrative control of southern
East Asia and access to its human and material resources were contingent
on the manipulation, exploitation and transformation of connectivity webs
within and beyond the region. In its initial stage, the Sinitic imperial expan-
sion to the south of Yangzi may have been driven by the considerations of
strategic security, such as the need to establish a defensible perimeter along
topographic divides. Over the next few centuries, it unraveled into an effort
to control the emerging southern belt of the Eurasian exchange network.
This study combines the two perspectives outlined above: at the macro
level, it looks into patterns of interregional contacts and the changing
nature of interaction networks to understand the directions, dynamics and
aftermath of the Qin imperial expansion. At the micro level, it explores the
ways in which the activities of Qin local administrations in the South fed
into the socioeconomic impact of the empire by shaping patterns of popu-
lation mobility and resource transfer and by contributing to the accumula-
tion of geographical and environmental knowledge. The collapse of the Qin
Empire after 210 BCE entailed not only the destruction of state spaces and
the temporary retreat of the imperial administration, but also the reconfig-
uration of long-range and local webs of economic exchange, cultural influ-
ence, and political power conducive to a more sustainable Sinitic imperial
rule in southern East Asia.
This double perspective switches between, on the one hand, locally
focused sources, such as the Qin county archive excavated in western
Hunan and the associated settlement and cemetery sites, and, on the other,
 Introduction 17
material that provides a broader regional and empire-wide outlook, such as
archaeological surveys and transmitted official histories. Textual historians
and archaeologists have been grappling with striking a balance between the
“local” and the “global,” which involves, among other things, the problem
of generalization from site-specific evidence.82
To take one example, the detailed record of the use of coined money in a
Qin county south of the Middle Yangzi sheds light on the otherwise obscure
beginnings of the monetization of southern economies at the time of the
Sinitic expansion, which is reflected by finds of imperial coins throughout
southern East Asia (see Chapters 5 and 7).83 Yet such finds do not necessarily
reflect commercial exchanges with the empire, let alone full-fledged integra-
tion into imperial networks of trade, taxation, and state procurement. Coins
had nonmonetary uses, e.g., as auspicious symbols and identity markers or,
conversely, they could also be deliberately avoided in the funerary contexts
as an act of resistance to the empire.84 Neither the presence nor the absence
of coins can be interpreted as a direct indication of economic integration or
lack thereof. Context-sensitive interpretations are necessary.
By the same token, students of the administrative, legal, and financial sys-
tems of the Qin and Han empires need to pay attention to the historical,
geographical, and archaeological backgrounds of the excavated manuscripts
that provide the bulk of relevant evidence. Establishing parallels with other
excavated and transmitted texts is at the core of this methodology,85 but
some important dynamics can be concealed by the terminological continuity
across the textual corpus, and what appears to be a general or even “logical”
development of certain institutions and practices may in fact be a response
to peculiar problems of frontier management, logistics optimization, etc.86
One of the primary objectives of this book is to connect one of the most
extensive and diverse collections of documentary evidence on the early stage
of Sinitic imperial presence south of the Yangzi with historical and archae-
ological narratives about the reordering of interaction spaces in southern
East Asia in the late first millennium BCE and early first millennium CE.

Excavated documents and their context

Until recently, the historical accounts of Qin expansion to the south of Yangzi
were limited to sketchy chronological outlines. So much was allowed by the
terse records in the transmitted official histories, such as The Grand Scribe’s
Records (Shiji, late second to early first century BCE), The Documents of
[Western] Han (Hanshu, first century CE), and other texts from the early
imperial period. Next to nothing was known about the organization of gov-
ernance and socioeconomic changes in the southern borderlands of the first
Sinitic empire.
This started to change after the 1970s with the archaeological discov-
ery of Qin and Han manuscripts at numerous sites in the Yangzi valley,
where the high water table ensured the preservation of organic materials in
18 Introduction
Table 1.1 Excavated Qin and early Western Han manuscripts used in this book

Manuscript Excavation
corpus Location Date Range of texts date

Haojiaping Qingchuan 309 BCE Legal ordinance 1979–1980

tomb no. 50 County,
Sichuan
Shuihudi Yunmeng Late Legal texts, judicial case 1975–1976
tomb no. 11 County, Warring records, prognostication
Hubei States manuals, private
chronicle, admonitions to
officials
Shuihudi Yunmeng Late Private letters 1975–1976
tomb no. 4 County, Warring
Hubei States
(223 BCE)
Yuelu Unknown Imperial Legal texts, judicial case Unknown
Academy Qin records, arithmetical
collection manual, divination
manual, admonitions to
officials, diary
Liye Xiangxi 222–208 Administrative documents, 2002
Autonomous BCE private letters, medical
Prefecture, recipes, etc.
Hunan
Zhangjiashan Jiangling Early Legal texts, judicial case 1983–1984
tomb no. 247 County, Western records, calendar,
Hubei Han arithmetical manual,
(before literary texts
186 BCE)

waterlogged tombs, including inscribed bamboo slips and wooden tablets.87

While some texts, particularly, legal statutes and ordinances, embody a nor-
mative perspective on the functioning of the state, other documents reflect
the actual situation on the ground, which often diverged from the letter of
official regulation (see Table 1.1).
The two groups of legal texts most frequently mentioned throughout this
book are the Qin manuscripts from tomb no. 11 at Shuihudi, which was
sealed around 217 BCE, and the early Western Han texts from tomb no. 247
in Zhangjiashan, sealed in or soon after 186 BCE. Both of the locations are
within the borders of the present-day Hubei Province, north of Middle Yangzi.
The Shuihudi corpus was excavated in 1975 and contains 1,155 inscribed
bamboo slips along with some eighty fragments, including three collections
of statutes, explanations of legal terminology, and records of model court
cases.88 Most of these texts are dated from the late Warring States period.
Less than ten years later, a comparable cache of legal texts was excavated at
Zhangjiashan. It includes a partial record of at least twenty-seven statutes
and a group of ordinances as well as a collection of difficult legal cases, some
of which date back to the late Warring States and imperial Qin.89
 Introduction 19
While these two finds, as well as most of the other manuscripts used in
this study, have been excavated archaeologically, one important but unprove-
nanced group of Qin legal materials, known as the Yuelu Academy texts, was
purchased in the Hong Kong antiques market in 2007. Dated from the impe-
rial Qin period, these manuscripts are believed to have been looted from a Qin
tomb not too far away from Shuihudi and Zhangjiashan.90 The publication is
still ongoing.91 While the authenticity of many unprovenanced documents is
being questioned, and appropriately so as some collections have been demon-
strated to be downright forgeries,92 the authenticity of the Yuelu manuscripts
is well supported by their codicological, syntactical, and semantic features.93
Apart from the legal texts, which primarily represent the central gov-
ernment’s perspective, archaeologists have excavated a number of official
archives south of Yangzi that shed light on the work of local administra-
tions. One of the most significant discoveries was made in 2002–2005 during
the excavations of the fortified town of Liye in the mountainous northwest-
ern part of present-day Hunan Province. The settlement is dated from the
late Warring States through the Han period. Archaeologists have recovered
some 37,000 wooden tablets discarded in an ancient well, along with a small
number of bamboo slips in the defensive moat. More than 17,000 tablets bear
inscriptions, making this the largest find of Qin manuscripts up to the pres-
ent.94 The documents were identified as the remnants of the official archive of
Qianling County, which was part of Dongting Commandery, the Qin admin-
istrative unit established at the very end of the Warring States era in the con-
quered lands south of the Middle Yangzi.95 The dates in the texts fall between
222 and 209 BCE, roughly coinciding with the Qin imperial period.96
The significance of the Qianling archive lies not only in its size and rich-
ness but also in its geographical and historical context. Qianling was part
of the southern frontier administration, where new policies were tested to
consolidate Qin rule over the conquered territories, improve the efficiency
of the administrative apparatus, exploit local resources and forge new iden-
tities for the local population and immigrants. All of these developments are
reflected in the county’s documentary records.
Document repositories comparable to that of Qianling have also been
found at a few other sites in Hunan. While most of the materials published
so far are dated to the Eastern Han (25–220 CE) and the Three Kingdoms
period (220–280 CE),97 a large group of administrative texts from an ancient
well at Tuzishan probably represents the archive of Yiyang County of the
late Warring States Chu, which continued into the Qin and Western Han
periods. These documents are still awaiting publication.98

Outline of content
This book consists of eight chapters, including the Introduction.
Chapter 2, “Before the Empire: The Middle Yangzi Interaction Space,”
sets the geographical stage for the study by sketching the history of
20 Introduction
sociocultural interaction in the Middle Yangzi region from beginnings in
the Late Neolithic (third millennium BCE) till the formation of territorial
states during the Warring States period. This longstanding interaction
space took a distinct political shape around the middle of the first millen-
nium BCE, when the state of Chu introduced regular territorial administra-
tion to organize military defense, tax trade, and recruit local populations
for labor and military services. When the Qin armies eliminated Chu in 222
BCE, they took over a region with a long tradition of economic connectivity
and a more recent, Chu tradition of centralized administrative control. The
Middle Yangzi’s connections with neighboring regions defined the direc-
tions of further Qin expansion in the South.
Chapter 3, “Qin’s Southward Expansion in the Warring States Period,”
introduces the state of Qin, which spearheaded Sinitic expansion in the
south for about 100 years during the late Warring States and imperial Qin
periods. I adopt a long-term perspective on the interaction among the socie-
ties of the northwestern highlands, the original home of the Qin polity, and
those of the Yangzi basin, and argue that Qin’s embeddedness in the geo-
graphic interstice between the highlands, Central Plains, and Yangzi worlds
provides an essential background for understanding the pattern of its
expansion starting from the mid-fourth century BCE. The chapter explores
the process by which the emergence of territorial states during the Warring
States period resulted in the transformation of longstanding networks of
cultural exchange, resource circulation and political alliance-making into
the arenas of military conquest and administrative incorporation.
Chapter 4, “The Qin Empire in the South: Territoriality, Organization,
Challenges,” uses recently excavated administrative and legal manuscripts
to discuss the territorial constitution of the Qin Empire, its administrative
organization south of the Middle Yangzi, and the challenges its officials were
facing in their attempts to govern the populations and exploit the resources
of the southern borderlands. The Qin imperial authorities recognized the
limitations of their control over the enormous territories conquered during
the final decade of the Warring States period, and instituted a policy of
gradual incorporation for these regions. However, local resistance and the
dissipation of badly needed resources in the continuing military expansion
severely limited the efficiency of these measures. The chapter also addresses
the history of one particularly well-documented territory, the Dongting
Commandery, to flesh out the spatial configuration of imperial control in
the region and to illustrate the instability of administrative geography in
the Qin South.
Chapters 5 and 6 examine the local dimension of the Qin Empire’s south-
ern frontier by analyzing the written record of Qianling County. Chapter 5,
“The Local Administration in the South,” reconstructs the administra-
tive geography of the county, paying attention to the distribution of loci
of state presence within it. The chapter moves on to discuss the local gov-
ernment’s social policies aimed to set up communities, forge new identities
 Introduction 21
and transform local populations into law-abiding, tax-paying imperial sub-
jects. The chapter addresses the role of the unfree population in the county’s
economy and the impact of official procurement strategies on commercial
growth and monetization. Qin’s proactive frontier management informed
the empire’s lasting impact in the southern borderlands, but also left local
administrations exposed to the volatility of imperial politics and overly reli-
ant on the smooth functioning of centralized redistributive mechanisms.
Chapter 6, “Resources and Resource Extraction,” shifts the focus from
human communities to material resources. The variable topography of the
Middle Yangzi region favored diverse subsistence strategies that, starting
from the Neolithic period, combined paddy rice and dryland crops agri-
culture. Tasked with opening up new land for farming, intensifying local
agriculture, and improving tax yields, the Qin administration in the region
prioritized specific agricultural niches and crops over others. The chapter
explores the ways in which these choices were framed by the general agro-
managerial strategies and their impact on the government’s ability to tap into
the local agriculture. I also discuss the state investment in the organization of
mining and metallurgy and in the extraction and export of biotic resources,
developments that transformed the local economy and were instrumental in
the region’s reintegration into the Sinitic empire under the Western Han.
Chapter 7, “Southern Borderlands after the Qin,” shifts back to the macro
perspective on southern East Asia. It seeks to explain the socioeconomic,
political, and cultural trajectories of the various regions after the fall of Qin
and the temporary withdrawal of the Sinitic empire from the lands south
of the Yangzi. After the formal restoration of imperial authority under the
new Han dynasty in 202 BCE, most of the former Qin possessions in the
Yangzi basin stayed under the control of regional states (zhuhou wangguo)
that were formally affiliated with Han but in practice enjoyed a large degree
of autonomy. The territories further to the south witnessed the consolida-
tion of independent regional states. Yet, despite the ostensible territorial
contraction of the early Western Han Empire compared to Qin, its southern
borderlands not only remained part of its economic and cultural sphere, but
increasingly adopted imperial administrative institutions and metropolitan
lifestyles, paving the way for reintegration into the Han Empire in the latter
half of the second century BCE. The chapter advocates the understanding
of empires as yet another, particularly potent form of long-range interaction
networks, which relied on military power for its initial consolidation but in
the longer run, like any other network, was reinforced or threatened by its
participants’ willingness to participate or to withdraw.
Chapter 8, “Epilogue: Networks, Empires, World-Systems. Southern East
Asia and the Dynamics of Sinitic Empire,” concludes the study by consider-
ing southern East Asia and its relations with the early Sinitic empires from
the world-systemic perspective. The socioeconomic and institutional transi-
tion of the early Western Han period led to the formation of the East Asian
economic core, where fiscal compromise between rulers and provincial
22 Introduction
elites fed the growth of private markets, resulting in a political-economic
regime capable of generating powerful economic and social incentives for
participation in the interaction networks that it sponsored and benefited
from. The result was the emergence of an imperial network, or, to use a
term from world-systems analysis, a world-empire economy, in which the
southern borderlands formed part of an extensive semi-peripheral zone that
spread far beyond the military-administrative reach of the empire. Because
this zone was embedded in the extremely flexible, acephalous web of multi-
valent interactions across the South China Sea, and because of its location
at the intersection of two world-economies, East Asian and South Asian, it
possessed a unique dynamic that, after the weakening of political power in
the East Asian core in the late second century CE, profoundly and irrevers-
ibly affected the reconfiguration of that core. In a longer run, this reconfig-
uration transformed the southern borderlands of the early empires into the
new economic and cultural heartland of the Sinitic world, a process that, as
this book argues, is to be understood against the background of the founda-
tion of Chinese imperial rule in southern East Asia.

Notes
1 Hans Bielenstein, “The Chinese Colonization of Fukien until the End
of T’ang,” in Sören Egerod and Elsa Glahn, eds., Studia Serica Bernhard
Karlgren Dedicata (Copenhagen: Ejnar Munksgaard, 1959), 98–122; and Hugh
Clark, The Sinitic Encounter in Southeast China through the First Millennium
CE (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2016), 27–28.
2 For a visualization of the spatial structure of the Han Empire with its division
into the core or “inner provinces” and the periphery composed of frontier
provinces, see, for example, Richard Von Glahn, The Economic History of
China: From Antiquity to the Nineteenth Century (New York: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 2016), 119. Note the blank space outside the formal borders of
the empire.
3 Willem van Schendel, “Geographies of Knowing, Geographies of Ignorance:
Jumping Scale in Southeast Asia,” Environment and Planning D: Society and
Space 20.6 (2002): 647–68; James Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An
Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (New Haven and London: Yale
University Press, 2009).
4 Bérénice Bellina, “Maritime Silk Roads’ Ornament Industries: Socio-­Political
Practices and Cultural Transfers in the South China Sea,” Cambridge
Archaeological Journal 24.3 (2014): 345–77; Bérénice Bellina, Aude Favereau,
and Laure Dussubieux, “Southeast Asian Early Maritime Silk Road Trading
Polities’ Hinterland and the Sea-Nomads of the Isthmus of Kra,” Journal of
Anthropological Archaeology 54 (2019): 102–20.
5 This term was coined by Erica Fox Brindley in collaboration with Francis
Allard and John Phan, and presented and discussed at two scholarly events
in 2018 and 2019: “The Greater South China Sea Interaction Zone: A Work-
shop to Explore Interdisciplinary Interventions into the Study of the Ancient
East Eurasian South,” Columbia University, April 27–28, 2018; and “Contact
Zones and Colonialism in China’s South, 221 BCE–1368 CE,” Pennsylvania
State University, May 9–12, 2019. I am grateful to Erica Fox Brindley for pro-
viding me this information.
 Introduction 23
6 The role of Southeast Asian highlands as a zone of refuge for people fleeing
the burdens of state exploitation and hierarchical organization in the lowland
polities has been emphasized in Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed, 1–39.
For a similar interpretation of the coastal and maritime spaces, see, for exam-
ple, Geoffrey Benjamin, “On Being Tribal in the Malay World,” in Geoffrey
Benjamin and Cynthia Chou, eds., Tribal Communities in the Malay World:
Historical, Cultural and Social Perspectives (Singapore: Institute of Southeast
Asian Studies, 2002), 7–76; and Bellina et al., “Southeast Asian Early Mari-
time Silk Road,” 102–20.
7 The Han expansion in southern East Asia and beyond is discussed in detail in
Chapter 7 of this book. For the Sui and Tang imperial efforts to establish con-
trol over Lingnan and the southwestern highlands, see, for example, Charles
Backus, The Nan-Chao Kingdom and Tang China’s Southwestern Frontier
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 3–23; Keith Taylor, The Birth
of Vietnam (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press,
1983), 124–97; John Herman, “The Kingdom of Nanzhong: China’s Southwest
Border Region Prior to the Eighth Century,” T’oung Pao 95.4/5 (2009): 241–86.
For the Yuan (Mongol) conquests in the same directions, see, for example,
John Herman, Amid the Clouds and Mist: China’s Colonization of Guizhou,
1200–1700 (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 2007),
45–70; James Anderson, “Man and Mongols: the Dali and Đại Việt Kingdoms
in the Face of the Northern Invasions,” in James Anderson and John Whit-
more, eds., China’s Encounters on the South and Southwest: Reforging the Fiery
Frontier Over Two Millennia (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2014), 106–34. For the
Ming empire’s short-lived conquest of northern and central Vietnam at the
beginning of the fifteenth century, see Kathlene Baldanza, Ming China and
Vietnam: Negotiating Borders in Early Modern Asia (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2016), 63–71.
8 For the history of trade routes in the South China Sea and introduction of new
commodities, such as spices, into the maritime trading circuits in the early
medieval period, see, for example, Linda Shaffer, Maritime Southeast Asia to
1500 (Armonk and New York: M.E. Sharpe, 1996), 18–36; and Kenneth Hall,
A History of Early Southeast Asia: Maritime Trade and Societal Development,
100–1500 (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2011), 37–66.
9 Cf. Herold Wiens, China’s March toward the Tropics (Hamden: The Shoe
String Press, 1954).
10 See, for example, Sanguo zhi [Records of the Three Kingdoms], 5 vols. Chen
Shou (233–297 CE), comp. (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2006), 35.912–15; Ma Zhijie,
Sanguo shi [History of the Three Kingdoms] (Beijing: Renmin, 2004), 67–76.
11 For a recent discussion of the problems involved in projecting the image of a
massive, culturally homogenous entity of “China” onto ancient and medieval
East Asian polities, integrating early empires into the nationalist historical
narrative as the earliest political manifestations of Han Chinese ethnic iden-
tity, and interpreting the expansion of this empires as acculturation of frontier
ethnic “minorities” into a more advanced civilization, see, for example, Xu Jie-
shun, “Understanding the Snowball Theory of Han Nationality,” in Thomas
Mullaney et al., eds., Critical Han Studies: The History, Representation, and
Identities of China’s Majority (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012),
113–25; Nicolas Tackett, The Origins of the Chinese Nation: Song China and
the Forging of an East Asian World Order (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2017), 3–9; and Andrew Chittick, The Jiankang Empire in Chinese and
World History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 4–19.
12 For the formation and consolidation of the Sinitic literary canon in the first
millennium BCE, and its role in redefining elite identity, see Mark Lewis,
24 Introduction
Writing and Authority in Early China (Albany: State University of New York
Press, 1999); Martin Kern, “Ritual, Text, and the Formation of the Canon:
Historical Transitions of Wen in Early China,” T’oung Pao 87.1/3 (2001): 43–91;
Martin Kern, “The Odes in Excavated Manuscripts,” in Martin Kern, ed.,
Text and Ritual in Early China, (Seattle and London: University of Washing-
ton Press, 2005), 149–93. For an archaeological perspective on the formation
of the Zhou cultural sphere and its defining texts, see Lothar von Falken-
hausen, Chinese Society in the Age of Confucius (1000–250 BC): The Archaeo-
logical Evidence (Los Angeles: Cotsen Institute of Archaeology, University of
California, Los Angeles, 2006).
13 Robin D.S. Yates, “Reflections on the Foundation of the Chinese Empire in
the Light of Newly Discovered Legal and Related Manuscripts,” in Kwang-
tsuu Chen, ed., Dongya kaoguxue de zaisi – Zhang Guangzhi xiansheng shishi
shi zhounian jinian lunwenji [Rethinking East Asian archaeology: A memo-
rial essay collection for the tenth anniversary of Kwang-chih Chang’s death]
(Taipei: Academia Sinica, 2013), 473–506; and Takamura Takeyuki, “Sengoku
Shin no “teikoku” ka to shūen ryōiki tōchi no hensen [“Imperialization” of
Qin during the Warring States era and changes in territorial control at the
frontiers], in Takamura et al., eds., Shūen ryōiki kara mita Shin Kan teikoku
[Frontier perspective on the Qin and Han empires] (Tokyo: Rokuichi shobō,
2019), 51–66.
14 Inspired by the rise of world-history approach in humanities and world-system
theory in political sciences, and reinforced by models borrowed from sciences
and sociology, various network-based research approaches have gained cur-
rency among the scholars of the ancient world over the past three decades. For
a manifesto of the network approach to the study of ancient Mediterranean,
see Irad Malkin, Christy Constantakopoulou and Katerina Panagopoulou,
“Introduction,” in Malkin, Constantakopoulou and Panagopoulou, eds.,
Greek and Roman Networks in the Mediterranean (Oxford and New York:
Routledge, 2009), 1–11. For a reinterpretation of early Sinitic polities as net-
works of power, authority, resources, discourses and technological knowl-
edge, see Roderick Campbell, “Toward a Network and Boundaries Approach
to Early Complex Polities: The Late Shang Case,” Current Anthropology 50.6
(2009): 821–48.
15 The Qin empire-building story in one of the main transmitted sources of
China’s ancient history, The Grand Scribe’s Records (Shiji), is anchored in the
official annals (in the case of the First Emperor) and the biographies (for Shang
Yang, Bai Qi and others) of these individuals. See Shiji [The Grand Scribe’s
Records], 10 vols. Sima Qian (145/135 – ca. 86 BCE), comp. (Beijing: Zhonghua
shuju, 2006), 6.223–94; 68.2227–39; 70.2279–305; 71.2307–21; 73.2331–42.
16 As argued by some world-systems scholars who see empires as political-­
military structures designed to control preexisting large-scale economic net-
works (world-economies) and to reinforce relationships of unequal exchange
between their cores and peripheries. See, for example, K. Ekholm and
J. Friedman, “‘Capital’ Imperialism and Exploitation in Ancient World Sys-
tems,” in Andre Gunder Frank and Barry Gills, eds., The World System: Five
Hundred Years or Five Thousand? (London and New York: Routledge, 1993),
59–80; and V.A. Yakobson, ed., Istorija Vostoka [History of the East], 6 vols.
Vol. 1: Vostok v drevnosti [The East in Antiquity] (Moscow: Vostochnaja liter-
atura RAN, 1997), 221. For a recent discussion and criticism of the representa-
tion of ancient empires as “narrowly extractive” entities, see Clifford Ando,
“Empire as State: The Roman Case,” in John Brooke, Julia Strauss and Greg
Anderson, eds., State Formations: Global Histories and Cultures of Statehood
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 175–89.
 Introduction 25
17 Much of this criticism came from none other than the founder of the world-­
systems theory, Immanuel Wallerstein, who insisted on the principal dif-
ferences between the modern capitalist and pre-modern world-systems, as
against scholars who argued for a single, 5,000-year-long Eurasian world sys-
tem. See Wallerstein, “World System versus World-Systems: A Critique,” in
Frank and Gills, eds., The World System, 292–96.
18 See, for example, Andre Gunder Frank and Barry Gills, “The 5,000-Year
World System: An Interdisciplinary Introduction,” in Frank and Gills, eds.,
The World System, 3–55; and Christopher Chase-Dunn and Thomas Hall,
Rise and Demise: Comparing World-Systems (Boulder: Westview Press, 1997).
19 See, for example, Philip Kohl, “World-Systems and Modelling Macro-­
Historical Processes in Later Prehistory: An Examination of Old and a
Search for New Perspectives,” in Toby Wilkinson, Susan Sherratt and John
Bennet, eds., Interweaving Worlds: Systemic Interactions in Eurasia, 7th to the
1st Millennia BC (Oxford: Oxbow, 2011), 77–86.
20 See, for example, Susan Sherratt, “Introduction,” in Wilkinson et al., eds.,
Interweaving Worlds, 1–3; Roxana Flammini, “Northeast Africa and the
Levant in Connection: A World-System Perspective on Interregional Rela-
tionships in the Early Second Millennium BC,” in Wilkinson et al., eds., Inter-
weaving Worlds, 205–17; Flammini, “World-Systems from ‘the Theory’ to ‘a
Perspective’: On Social Interconnections in Bronze Age Afro-Eurasia,” in
David Warburton, ed., Political and Economic Interaction on the Edge of Early
Empires, eTopoi. Journal for Ancient Studies, Special Volume 7 (2020): 56–73;
and Flammini, “Economics, Political Practices and Identities on the Nile:
Convergence and Conflicts ca. 1800 to 1530 BC,” in Warburton, ed., Political
and Economic Interaction, 116–54.
21 See, for example, Philippe Beaujard, “Evolutions and Temporal Delimitations
of Bronze Age World-Systems in Western Asia and the Mediterranean,” in
Wilkinson et al., eds., Interweaving Worlds, 7–26.
22 Maxim Korolkov, “Fiscal Transformation during the Formative Period of
Ancient Chinese Empire (Late Fourth to First Century BCE),” in Jonathan
Valk and Irene Soto, eds., Ancient Taxation: The Mechanics of Extraction
in Comparative Perspective (New York: New York University Press, 2021),
203–61.
23 For the original formulation of the idea of “advantages of backwardness,” see
Alexander Gershenkron, Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962). For the analysis of semi-­
peripheries as crucial sites in world-systemic change, see Chase-Dunn and
Hall, “Conceptualizing Core/Periphery Hierarchies for Comparative Study,”
in Chase-Dunn and Hall, eds., Core/Periphery Relations in Precapitalist Worlds
(London and New York: Routledge, 1991), 5–44; and Chase-Dunn and Hall,
Rise and Demise, 78–98. Michael Mann integrated the discussion of revolu-
tionary institutional developments at the peripheries (he calls them marches)
of civilizational cores into the broader theory of interstitial interactions as the
formation mechanism of the more potent configurations of social power. See
Mann, The Sources of Social Power, Vol. 1: A History of Power from the Begin-
ning to A.D. 1760 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 130–300.
24 See, for example, David Ludden, “The Process of Empire: Frontiers and
Borderlands,” in Peter Fibiger Bang and C.A. Bayly, eds., Tributary Empires
in Global History (New York and London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 132–50;
Campbell, “Toward a Network and Boundaries Approach,” 821–48; Christian
Langer and Manuel Fernandez-Götz, “Boundaries, Borders, and Frontiers:
Contemporary and Past Perspectives,” in Warburton, ed., Political and
Economic Interaction, 23–47.
26 Introduction
25 Ann Stahl, “Political Economic Mosaics: Archaeology of the Last Two
Millennia in Tropical Sub-Saharan Africa,” Annual Review of Anthropology
33 (2004): 145–72; Lars Rosdeth, “The Fragmentary Frontier: Expansion and
Ethnogenesis in the Himalayas,” in Bradley Parker and Lars Rosdeth, eds.,
Untaming the Frontier in Anthropology, Archaeology and History (Tucson: Uni-
versity of Arizona Press, 2005), 83–109; Michael Frachetti, “Multi-Regional
Emergence of Mobile Pastoralism and Non-Uniform Institutional Complex-
ity across Eurasia,” Current Anthropology 53.1 (2012): 2–38; and Rowan Flad
and Pochan Chen, Ancient Central China: Centers and Peripheries Along the
Yangzi River (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 1–16.
26 Tina Thurston, Landscapes of Power, Landscapes of Conflict: State Formation
in the South Scandinavian Iron Age (New York: Springer Scientific, 2001).
27 Campbell, “Toward a Network and Boundaries Approach,” 821–48; Flad and
Chen, Ancient Central China; Maxim Korolkov, “Empire-Building and Mar-
ket-Making at the Qin Frontier: Imperial Expansion and Economic Change,
221–207 BCE,” Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia University, 2020.
28 See, for example, Owen Lattimore, Inner Asian Frontiers of China (New York:
American Geographical Society, 1940); Nicola Di Cosmo, “Ancient Inner
Asian Nomads: Their Economic Basis and Its Significance in Chinese His-
tory,” Journal of Asian Studies 53.4 (1994): 1092–126; Thomas Barfield, “The
Shadow Empires: Imperial State Formation along the Chinese-Nomad Fron-
tier,” in Susan Alcock, Terence D’Altroy, Kathleen Morrison and Carla Sin-
opli, eds., Empires: Perspectives from Archaeology and History (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2001), 10–41; Di Cosmo, Ancient China and Its
Enemies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Jan Bemmann and
Michael Schmauder, eds., Complexity of Interaction along the Eurasian Steppe
Zone in the First Millennium CE (Bonn: Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-­
Universität Bonn, 2015); Katheryn Linduff, Yan Sun, Wei Cao, and Yuanqing
Liu, Ancient China and Its Eurasian Neighbors: Artifacts, Identity and Death in
the Frontier, 3000–700 BCE (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018);
Catrin Kost, “Changed Strategies of Interaction: Exchange Relations on Chi-
na’s Northern Frontier in Light of the Finds from Xinzhuangtou,” in Kath-
eryn Lynduff and Karen Rubinson, eds., How Objects Tell Stories: Essays in
Honor of Emma C. Bunker (Turnhout: Brepols Publishers, 2018), 51–73.
29 Wiens, China’s March toward the Tropics, xi.
30 See, for example, Leo Shin, The Making of the Chinese State: Ethnicity and
Expansion on the Ming Borderlands (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2006); C. Patterson Giersch, Asian Borderlands: The Transformation of Qing
China’s Yunnan Frontier (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University
Press, 2006); Herman, Amid the Clouds and Mist; Yingcong Dai, The Sichuan
Frontier and Tibet: Imperial Strategy in the Early Qing (Seattle and London:
University of Washington Press, 2009); Ulrich Theobald, War Finance and
Logistics in Late Imperial China: A Study of the Second Jinchuan Campaign
(1771–1776) (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2013); John Herman, “From Land Rec-
lamation to Land Grab: Settler Colonialism in Southwest China, 1680–1735,”
Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 78.1 (2018): 91–123.
31 Publications of individual finds and surveys of regional archaeology are
too many to be listed here. For the archaeology of the southern regions of
China, see, for example, Francis Allard, “The Archaeology of Dian: Trends
and Tradition,” Antiquity 279 (1999): 77–85; Hunan sheng wenwu kaogu
yanjiusuo Hunan sheng kaogu xuehui, ed., Hunan kaogu 2002 [Hunan
archaeology 2002] (Changsha: Yuelu shushe, 2003); Allard, “Frontiers and
Boundaries: The Han Empire from Its Southern Periphery,” in Miriam
Stark, ed., Archaeology of Asia (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 233–54; Alice
 Introduction 27
Yao, The Ancient Highlands of Southwest China: From the Bronze Age to the
Han Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016); Xiaotong Wu, Anke
Hein, Xingxiang Zhang, Zhengyao Jin, Dong Wei, Fang Huang, and Xijie
Yin, “Resettlement Strategies and Han Imperial Expansion into Southwest
China: A Multimethod Approach to Colonialism and Migration,” Archae-
ological and Anthropological Sciences 11 (2019): 6751–81; Liu Rui, Qin Han
diguo nanyuan de mianxiang: yi kaogu shijiao de shenshi [The southern fringes
of the Qin and Han empires: an archaeological investigation] (Beijing:
Zhongguo shehui kexue, 2019). For the archaeology of Southeast Asia, see,
for example, Charles Higham, The Archaeology of Mainland Southeast Asia
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Higham, Early Cultures
of Mainland Southeast Asia (Bangkok: River Books, 2002); Hall, A History
of Early Southeast Asia; and Nam Kim, The Origins of Ancient Vietnam
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).
32 Catherine Churchman, The People Between the Rivers: The Rise and Fall of a
Bronze Drum Culture, 200–750 CE (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2016).
33 Op. cit., 68–75.
34 Op. cit., 31–35.
35 Chittick, The Jiankang Empire.
36 Chittick’s term for the early medieval Sino-nomadic regimes in northern
China is “Sino-steppe,” see, for example, Chittick, The Jiankang Empire,
7–8. Other authors have called them “Särbo-Chinese (Xianbeo-Chinese)” or
“Sino-Särbi.” See Sanping Chen, Multicultural China in the Early Middle Ages
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 4–38; and David Jon-
athan Felt, “The Metageography of the Northern and Southern Dynasties,”
T’oung Pao 103.4/5 (2017): 334–87.
37 See Geoff Wade, “The Southern Chinese Borders in History,” in Grant Evans,
Christopher Hutton, and Kuah Khun Eng, eds., Where China Meets Southeast
Asia: Social and Cultural Change in the Border Regions (Singapore: Institute of
Southeast Asian Studies 2000), 28–50; Victor Mair, “Preface,” in Victor Mair
and Liam Kelley, eds., Imperial China and Its Southern Neighbours (Singapore:
Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2015), vii–ix.
38 Thus, according to a relatively recent publication, “unlike the northern fron-
tier, where technological and material inequalities were negated by ecological
balances, the southern indigenes had no such protection – they were, after
all, agriculturalists. Just as the aboriginals who met the expanding Europeans
gave way in the face of the latter’s unmatched technological prowess, so the
natives of China’s southern frontier were overwhelmed by the technological
and material superiority of the intruders.” See Hugh Clark, “Frontier Dis-
course and China’s Maritime Frontier: China’s Frontiers and the Encounter
with the Sea through Early Imperial History,” Journal of World History 20.1
(2009): 1–33. For the above quotation, see p. 19. For a discussion of this per-
spective on the history of southern borderlands, see Wang Gungwu, “Intro-
duction: Imperial China Looking South,” in Mair and Kelley, eds., Imperial
China and Its Southern Neighbours, 1–15.
39 See Gideon Shelach-Lavi, The Archaeology of Early China: From Prehistory
to the Han Dynasty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 127–60;
Li Min, Social Memory and State Formation in Early China (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2018), 42–81; and Anping Pei, A Study of
Prehistoric Settlement Patterns in China (Singapore: Springer, 2020), 97–165.
40 See Flad and Chen, Ancient Central China, 71–167; Shelach-Lavi, The Archae-
ology of Early China, 241–47; and Celine Lai, Contacts Between the Shang
and the South c. 1300–1045 BC: Resemblance and Resistance (Oxford: British
Archaeological Reports, 2019).
28 Introduction
41 For the history and archaeology of Chu, see Constance Cook and John Major,
eds., Defining Chu: Image and Reality in Ancient China (Honolulu: University
of Hawaiʻi Press, 1999); Yang Quanxi, Chu wenhua [The Chu culture] (Beijing:
Wenwu, 2000); Flad and Chen, Ancient Central China, 108–39.
42 For the archaeological perspective on the emergence of early polities in the
Red River Delta, see Higham, The Archaeology of Mainland Southeast Asia,
192–203; Nam Kim, Van Toi Lai and Hoang Hiep Trinh, “Co Loa: An Inves-
tigation of Vietnam’s Ancient Capital,” Antiquity 84 (2010): 1011–27; Kim, The
Origins of Ancient Vietnam; and Nam Kim, “Sinicization and Barbarization:
Ancient State Formation at the Southern Edge of Sinitic Civilization,” in
Mair and Kelley, eds., Imperial China and Its Southern Neighbours, 43–79.
43 For example, a recent isotopic analysis of human remains from the late Bronze
Age and Han-era cemetery at Shamaoshan in the Central Lakes region of
Yunnan demonstrated that most of the “Han migrants” to the southwestern
highlands were probably coming not from the Central Plains but from other
southern and southwestern regions such as Lingnan, the Middle Yangzi and
Sichuan. See Xiaotong Wu et al., “Resettlement Strategies and Han Imperial
Expansion,” 6751–81.
44 Erica Brindley, Ancient China and the Yue: Perceptions and Identities on the
Southern Frontier, c. 400 BCE–50 CE (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2015).
45 Op. cit., 21–44.
46 Op. cit., 80–81.
47 Op. cit., 115–40.
48 Churchman, The People between the Rivers, 141–201 and passim.
49 Chittick defines these repertoires as “rhetorical strategies of legitimation, the
ways in which the Jiankang elite conceptualized their state-building project.”
See Chittick, The Jiankang Empire, 36.
50 On the Sinitic, vernacular and Buddhist (Southeast Asian) repertoires of
political legitimation, see Chittick, The Jiankang Empire, 209–329.
51 Brindley, Ancient China and the Yue, 245.
52 Particularly influential was the essay by the Western Han statesman and polit-
ical thinker Jia Yi (200–169 BCE) titled The Discourse on the Faults of Qin
(Guo Qin lun). It is included in the Shiji “Basic Annals of the First Emperor,”
see Shiji, 6.276–85. A survey of Jia Yi’s life and career can be found in Charles
Sanft, “Rule: A Study of Jia Yi’s Xin shu,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of
Münster, 2005.
53 See Gideon Shelach, “Collapse or Transformation? Anthropological and
Archaeological Perspectives on the Fall of Qin,” in Yuri Pines, Gideon
Shelach, Lothar von Falkenhausen, and Robin D.S. Yates, eds., Birth of an
Empire: The State of Qin Revisited (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: Uni-
versity of California Press, 2014), 113–38.
54 The best-known product of this propaganda is the steles that celebrated the
unification of “All-Under-Heaven” by the First Emperor of Qin. Their inscrip-
tions survived, and were immortalized for many generations of China’s lite-
rati, in Sima Qian’s Shiji (Grand Scribe’s Records, also known as Records of the
Historian). For the study of these texts, see Martin Kern, The Stele Inscriptions
of Ch’in Shih-huang: Text and Ritual in Early Chinese Imperial Representation
(New Haven: American Oriental Society, 2000). For their messianic ideology,
see Yuri Pines, “From Historical Evolution to the End of History: Past, Pres-
ent, and Future from Shang Yang to the First Emperor,” in Paul Goldin, ed.,
Dao Companion to the Philosophy of Han Fei (Berlin: Springer, 2012), 25–45;
and Pines, “The Messianic Emperor: A New Look at Qin’s Place in China’s
History,” in Pines et al., eds., Birth of an Empire, 258–79.
 Introduction 29
55 For the references to Qin in the criticism of contemporary Han policies, see,
for example, Yantie lun jiaozhu [Discourse on salt and iron, edited and anno-
tated], 2 vols., Wang Liqi, ed., in Xinbian zhuzi jicheng (di yi ji) (Beijing: Zhon-
ghua shuju, 1992) 8.487–94; and Hanshu [The Documents of Han], 12 vols.
Ban Gu (32–92 CE), comp. (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2002), 56.2504–5. For
the use of the image of the Qin empire and its First Emperor in the criticism of
Emperor Wu in Han historiography, see Hans van Ess, “Emperor Wu of the
Han and the First August Emperor of Qin in Sima Qian’s Shiji,” in Pines et al.,
eds., Birth of an Empire, 239–57.
56 For the original Shiji account on the “burning of books and burying of schol-
ars,” which eventually became a catchphrase for the ruthless suppression of
intellectual freedom by the imperial authorities, see Shiji, 6.254–59. The study
of excavated Qin manuscripts has challenged the traditional narrative about
the Qin’s endorsement of so-called Legalist doctrines and the violent suppres-
sion of all competing intellectual traditions, especially that of the “Classicists”
(ru, often, though inaccurately, referred to as Confucianists). See, for example,
Lu Puping, “Yunmeng Qin jian “Wei li zhi dao” lunli sixiang zhi fenxi” [An
analysis of ethical theory in the Qin manuscript “The way of being an offi-
cial” from Yunmeng], Bamboo and Silk Manuscripts Web, Wuhan University,
http://www.bsm.org.cn/show_article.php?id=1885, accessed December 9, 2020.
57 Shuihudi Qin mu zhujian [The documents on bamboo slips from the Qin tomb
at Shuihudi], Shuihudi Qin mu zhujian zhengli xiaozu, ed. (Beijing: Wenwu,
1990), 1–10.
58 One such chronicle was excavated in 2001 at Yintai in Jingzhou Municipality,
Hubei Province. See Zheng Zhonghua, “Yintai mudi chutu dapi Xi Han jiandu”
[A large collection of Western Han documents excavated at Yintai cemetery], in
Jingzhou bowuguan, ed., Jingzhou zhongyao kaogu faxian [Important archae-
ological discoveries in Jingzhou] (Beijing: Wenwu, 2009), 204–8. Another has
recently been recovered, along with other manuscripts, from a Western Han
tomb at Hujia caochang in Jingzhou Municipality, Hubei Province. See Pan
Liwei, “Hubei Jingzhou chutu zhengui Xi-Han jiandu he Zhanguo Chu jian
jiju xueshu jiazhi” [The precious Western Han and Warring States Chu manu-
scripts excavated at Jingzhou, Hubei Province, have an extremely high schol-
arly value], Zhongguo xinwen wang [China News] https://www.chinanews.com/
cul/2019/05-06/8829027.shtml, accessed November 6, 2020.
59 That the Qin unification of 221 BCE was exaggerated in Han historiography,
and that some elements of the unification narrative may be a Han fabrication
rather than an accurate account of actual events, had already been pointed
out by Gu Jiegang (1893–1980), and was extensively elaborated upon in post-
war Japanese scholarship. For a recent summary, see Tsuruma Kazuyuki,
Shin teikoku no keisei to chiiki [Formation and territory of the Qin empire]
(Tokyo: Kyūko shoin, 2013), 546–48.
60 For the formulation of the “interaction sphere” paradigm in Chinese archae-
ology, which came to replace the monocentric paradigm informed by the
imperial historiographic tradition, see Kwang-Chih Chang, The Archaeology
of Ancient China, 4th edition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 234;
and Chang, “China on the Eve of the Historical Period,” in Edward Shaugh-
nessy and Michael Loewe, eds., The Cambridge History of Ancient China:
From the Origins of Civilization to 221 BC (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 1999), 37–73. For the political and administrative background of
the “regionalist paradigm” in Chinese archaeology, see Lothar von Falken-
hausen, “The Regionalist Paradigm in Chinese Archaeology,” in Philip Kohl
and Clare Fawcett, eds., Nationalism, Politics and the Practice of Archaeology
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 198–217.
Another random document with
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 Mutta Linnart Björnsson ehdotti sen sijaan, että hän saattaisi Klara
Gullaa vähän matkaa. Hän oli monta kertaa aikonut tulla laiturille
häntä tapaamaan, eikä hän nyt tahtonut päästää hyvää tilaisuutta
käsistään. Oli hyvinkin tärkeätä, arveli hän, että Klara Gulla saisi
kuulla, mitä sanottavaa hänellä oli.

Klara Gulla ei estellyt sen enempää. Mutta hän huomasi, että

miehen oli vaikea tuoda esille asiaansa, ja siksipä hän ei odottanut
mitään hyvää. Mies yskäsi useampaan kertaan ja etsi sanoja.

»Klara Gulla ei taida tietää, että minä olin viimeinen, joka puhui
Klara Gullan isän, keisarin kanssa, niinkuin meillä oli tapana häntä
nimittää.»

Klara Gulla vastasi, ettei hän sitä ollut kuullut. Ja samalla hän
kiirehti askeleitaan. Hän olisi kernaasti tahtonut niin pian kuin suinkin
päästä tästä keskustelusta eroon.

»Minä seisoin pihalla eräänä päivänä syksyllä ja valjastin hevosta,

sillä aioin lähteä kauppiaaseen», jatkoi Linnart Björnsson, »kun näin
keisarin tulevan juoksujalkaa tietä pitkin. Hänellä oli hyvin kiire, sen
saatoin arvata, mutta hän pysähtyi sittenkin huomatessaan minut, ja
kysyi, olinko nähnyt keisarinnan ajavan tästä ohi. Sitähän minun oli
mahdoton kieltää, ja silloin kyyneleet alkoivat valua hänen
silmistään. Hän oli ollut menossa Bron pitäjään, sanoi hän, mutta
äkkiä hän oli tuntenut niin suurta levottomuutta, että hänen oli
täytynyt kääntyä takaisin. Ja kun hän oli tullut kotiin, oli tupa ollut
tyhjänä. Katrinakin oli poissa. He aikoivat varmaan matkustaa
laivassa, eikä hän tiennyt miten hän pääsisi Borgin laiturille ennen
laivan lähtöä.»
 Klara Gulla pysähtyi. »Hän sai kai ajaa teidän mukananne», sanoi
hän. — »Niin», vastasi isäntä. »Janne oli tehnyt minulle kerran
suuren palveluksen, ja nyt minä tahdoin palkita sen hänelle. Ehkäpä
tein pahasti auttaessani häntä?» — »Ei, syy on kokonaan minun»,
sanoi Klara Gulla. »Minun ei olisi koskaan pitänyt pyrkiä pois hänen
luotaan.»

»Hän itki kaiken matkaa kuin pieni lapsi», sanoi Linnart Björnsson,
»enkä minä tiennyt oikein miten lohduttaa häntä, ja siksi pysyttelin
ääneti. 'Kyllä me ennätämme ajoissa, Janne', sanoin minä vihdoin.
'Älä itke noin kovasti. Nuo pikku laivat, jotka syksyisin kulkevat, eivät
ole kovin nopeakulkuisia'. Mutta tuskin olin sen sanonut, kun hän
tarttui käsivarteeni kiinni ja kysyi luulinko minä, että ne, jotka olivat
ryöstäneet keisarinnan, kohtelisivat häntä pahasti.»

»Ne, jotka olivat ryöstäneet minut!» toisti Klara Gulla ihmeissään.

»Minäkin hämmästyin, aivan kuin Klara Gulla nyt, ja kysyin, keitä

hän tarkoitti. Niin, hän tarkoitti niitä, jotka olivat väijyneet keisarinnaa
koko ajan hänen ollessaan täällä. Kaikki ne viholliset, joita Klara
Gulla oli pelännyt niin kovasti, ettei hän ollut uskaltanut panna
päähänsä kultakruunua eikä edes sanallakaan mainita Portugalliaa,
kaikki ne, jotka nyt olivat hyökänneet Klara Gullan kimppuun ja
vieneet hänet vankeuteen.»

»Vai niin, silläkö tavalla», sanoi Klara Gulla.

»Juuri niin, Klara Gulla», sanoi Linnart Björnsson painokkaasti.

»Klara Gulla kai ymmärtää, ettei Janne itkenyt sen vuoksi, että hänet
oli hyljätty ja jätetty yksin, vaan siksi, että hän luuli Klara Gullan
joutuneen vaaraan.»
 Linnart Björnssonin oli ollut vaikea saada viimeisiä sanoja
suustaan. Ne olivat takertua hänen kurkkuunsa. Ehkäpä hän ajatteli
vanhaa Björn Hindrikssonia ja itseään. Juuri tämä hänen oma
kokemuksensa auttoi häntä ymmärtämään, miten suurta arvoa oli
pantava rakkauteen, joka ei koskaan pettänyt.

Mutta Klara Gulla ei ymmärtänyt sitä vieläkään. Hän oli ajatellut

isäänsä ainoastaan inhoten, aina siitä saakka kun hän oli tullut kotiin.
Hän mutisi itsekseen jotain sellaista, että isä oli hullu.

Linnart Björnsson kuuli mitä hän sanoi, ja se loukkasi häntä.

»Enpä tiedä, oliko Janne niinkään mieletön», sanoi hän. »Minä
sanoin hänelle, etten ollut nähnyt vanginvartijoita Klara Gullan
mukana. 'Eikö Linnart Björnsson todellakaan nähnyt', vastasi hän,
'miten ne vartioivat häntä, kun hän ajoi tästä ohi. Siinä oli Ylpeys ja
Kovuus, siinä oli Pahe ja Huvitus, kaikki ne, joita vastaan hänen
täytyy taistella keisarikunnassaan'.»

Klara Gulla pysähtyi ja kääntyi Linnartiin. »Entäs sitten?» sanoi

hän vain.

»Minä vastasin hänelle, että ne viholliset minäkin olin nähnyt,»

vastasi Linnart Björnsson tylysti.

Klara Gulla naurahti.

»Mutta minä kaduin heti sanojani», jatkoi isäntä.

»Sillä nyt Janne alkoi aivan epätoivoisesti itkeä. 'Rukoilkaa

Jumalaa, kiltti Linnart Björnsson', sanoi hän, 'että voisin pelastaa
pikku tyttöni kaikesta pahasta. Mitä minusta itsestäni vähä, kunhan
hän vain pelastuu'.»
 Klara Gulla astui rivakammin eteenpäin eikä vastannut mitään.
Jokin tunne alkoi repiä ja raastaa hänen sydäntänsä, mutta hän
pakotti sen vaikenemaan. Jos se, mikä piileksi sisällä, pääsisi
valloilleen, niin mitenkä hän silloin voisi sitä kestää.

»Nämä olivat siis ikäänkuin hänen jäähyväissanansa», sanoi

Linnart Björnsson. »Eikä kauan kestänytkään, ennenkuin hän sai
näyttää tarkoittaneensa totta. Klara Gullan ei pidä koskaan luulla,
että Janne hyppäsi järveen vapautuakseen omasta surustaan. Hän
teki sen vain pelastaakseen Klara Gullan vihollisten vallasta.»

Yhä nopeammin ja nopeammin Klara Gulla kiiruhti eteenpäin. Isän

rakkaus, joka oli kestänyt ensi hetkestä aina viimeiseen saakka,
alkoi käydä hänelle selväksi. Mutta hän tahtoi vain paeta pois.
Hänen oli mahdoton kantaa sitä.

»Me pidämme hiukan toisiamme silmällä tässä pitäjässä», jatkoi

Linnart Björnsson seuratessaan Klara Gullaa ilman vähintäkään
ponnistusta. »Mielet olivat hyvinkin Klara Gullaa vastaan heti
keisarin hukuttua. Enkä minä puolestani pitänyt Klara Gullaa sen
arvoisena, että olisin tahtonut ilmaista Klara Gullalle Jannen
viimeisiä ajatuksia ja sanoja. Mutta me olemme nyt muuttaneet
mielemme. Me olemme hyvillämme siitä, että Klara Gulla seisoo
laiturilla ja odottaa isäänsä.»

Klara Gulla pysähtyi. Hänen poskiansa punoitti ja silmät säihkyivät

vihaa.

»Minä seison siellä vain siksi, että pelkään häntä», sanoi hän.

»Klara Gulla ei ole koskaan tahtonut tehdä itseänsä paremmaksi

kuin hän on. Sen me tiedämme. Mutta ehkäpä me ymmärrämme
paremmin kuin hän itsekään, mitä tämän odotuksen alla piilee.
Meilläkin on ollut vanhemmat. Emmekä mekään ole kohdelleet heitä
oikealla tavalla.»

Klara Gulla oli niin suutuksissaan, että hän aikoi sanoa jotakin
hirveää, mutta siitä ei tullut mitään. Hän tahtoi polkea jalkaansa
Linnart Björnssonilie saadakseen hänet vaikenemaan, mutta hän ei
kyennyt siihenkään. Hänellä ei ollut siis muuta neuvoa kuin kääntyä
pois ja juosta tiehensä.

Linnart Björnsson ei seurannut hänen jäljessään. Hän oli sanonut,

mitä hän oli tahtonut saada sanotuksi, eikä hän ollut tyytymätön
aamupäivän työhönsä.
KATRINAN KUOLEMA.

Kun Klara Gulla astui Skrolyckan pieneen tupaan, makasi Katrina

vuoteessaan, kalman kalpeana ja silmät ummessa. Näyttipä siltä,
kuin loppu jo olisi lähestynyt.

Mutta niin pian kuin Klara Gulla seisoi hänen vieressään ja siveli
hänen kättään, katsoi hän eteensä ja alkoi heti puhua.

»Janne kutsuu minua luokseen», sai hän suurella vaivalla

sanotuksi.
»Hän ei kanna minulle kaunaa sen johdosta, että läksin hänen
luotaan.»

Klara Gulla säpsähti. Hän alkoi käsittää, miksi äiti kuoli. Hän, joka
oli ollut uskollinen kokonaisen elämän ajan, oli surrut aivan
kuollakseen sitä, että hän lopuksi oli pettänyt Jannen.

»Ei teidän sen vuoksi tarvitse olla levottomalla mielellä!» sanoi

Klara
Gulla. »Minähän teitä pakotin lähtemään.»

»Sitä on joka tapauksessa ollut niin vaikea ajatella», sanoi Katrina.

»Mutta nyt on taas kaikki hyvin meidän välillämme.»
 Katrina sulki jälleen silmänsä ja makasi aivan hiljaa. Vähäinen
onnen välähdys levisi hänen kuihtuneille kasvoilleen.

Mutta hän alkoi pian taas puhua. Oli sellaista, jota hänen täytyi
saada sanotuksi. Muuten hän ei saisi rauhaa. »Älä ole niin vihoissasi
Jannelle, vaikka hän juoksi sinun jäljissäsi! Hän tarkoitti vain hyvää.
Sinun ei ollut hyvä olla sen jälkeen, kun te jouduitte eroon. Sen hän
tiesi. Eikä hänenkään. Te kuljitte harhaan kumpikin omalla
tavallanne.»

Klara Gulla oli tiennyt, että äiti tulisi sanomaan jotakin senkaltaista,
ja hän oli edeltäpäin karaissut mieltään. Mutta äidin sanat liikuttivat
häntä sittenkin enemmän kuin hän olisi voinut uskoa, ja hän koetti
vastata hänelle ystävällisesti.

»Minä koetan ajatella isää sellaisena kuin hän oli ennen», sanoi
hän.
»Muistattehan te kuinka hyvät ystävät me siihen aikaan olimme?»

Katrina näytti tyytyvän tähän vastaukseen, sillä hän rauhoittui

jälleen. Hän ei suinkaan ollut aikonut sanoa sen enempää, mutta
äkkiä hän alkoi hymyillä tyttärelleen ja hänen kasvonsa ilmaisivat
suurta hellyyttä.

»Minä olen niin iloinen, Klara Gulla», sanoi hän, »että olet tullut
jälleen kauniiksi.»

Nuo sanat ja tuo hymyily mursivat Klara Gullan itsehillitsemisen

kokonaan. Hän laskeutui polvilleen matalan vuoteen ääreen ja alkoi
itkeä. Ensi kertaa kotiin tultuaan hän purskahti oikeaan itkuun.
 »En tiedä, miten te voitte olla niin hyvä minulle, äiti. Minun syyni
on, että te kuolette nyt, ja isänkin kuolemaan olen minä syypää.»

Katrina hymyili edelleen ja koetti hiukan hyväillä kädellään.

»Te olette niin hyvä, äiti, te olette niin hyvä minulle», sanoi Klara
Gulla kesken itkuaan ja nyyhkytyksiään.

Katrina tarttui lujasti tyttären käteen ja kohosi istualleen

vuoteessaan voidakseen antaa vielä viimeisen todistuksensa.
»Kaiken sen hyvän mikä minussa on», sanoi hän, »olen oppinut
Jannelta.»

Tämän jälkeen hän vajosi takaisin päänalukselleen eikä sanonut

enää mitään tajuttavaa. Kuolonkamppailu alkoi, ja hän kuoli
seuraavana aamuna.

Mutta kuolonkamppailun kestäessä makasi Klara Gulla itkien

vuoteen ääressä. Hän makasi siinä ja itki pois kaiken tuskansa,
kuumehoureensa, velkakuormansa. Hänen kyyneleillään ei ollut
loppua.
KEISARIN HAUTAJAISET.

Joulun edellisenä sunnuntaina oli määrä saattaa Katrina hautaan,

eikä sellaisena pyhänä tavallisesti keräydy paljon väkeä kirkolle, sillä
kaikki tahtovat säästää kirkkomatkansa suuriksi juhlapäiviksi.

Mutta kun pieni saattojoukko Askedalista ajoi mäntymäkeä ylös

kirkon ja pitäjäntuvan välitse, nolostuivat he hiukan. Sillä niin suurta
joukkoa, kuin tänä päivänä, oli kirkolla ollut tuskin silloinkaan, kun
vanha Bron rovasti toimitti saarnavuoroaan Svartsjössä kerta
vuodessa tai kun papinvaalia pidettiin.

Olihan itsestään selvää, ettei mies talosta ollut lähtenyt vanhaa

Katrinaa saattamaan, vaan jotakin muuta täytyi olla tekeillä. Ehkäpä
odotettiin jotakuta suurmiestä kirkolle tai ehkäpä jonkun muun kuin
tavallisen papin oli määrä saarnata. Hehän asuivat niin syrjässä
Askedalissa, että paljonkin saattoi pitäjällä tapahtua heidän saamatta
siitä vihiä.

Ruumissaatto pysähtyi niinkuin tavallisesti pitäjäntuvan taakse ja

saattajat laskeutuivat maahan. Sielläkin oli väkeä yhtä paljon kun
mäntymäellä, mutta muuta ihmeellistä ei näyttänyt olevan.
Askedalilaiset alkoivat yhä enemmän ihmetellä, mutta he eivät
tahtoneet kysyä mitään. Saattojoukonhan pitää pysytellä erillään
muista eikä ruveta keskusteluihin niiden kanssa, jotka eivät ota osaa
suruun.

Arkku nostettiin alas laverirattailta, joilla se oli kuljetettu kirkolle, ja

laskettiin mustille pukeille, jotka jo edeltäkäsin olivat pystytetyt
pitäjäntuvan edustalle. Siinä piti nyt sen sekä kaikkien niiden, jotka
kuuluivat siihen, seisoa ja odottaa, kunnes kellot alkaisivat soida ja
pappi ja lukkari olisivat valmiit lähtemään hautausmaalle.

Oikea herran ilma oli kaiken aikaa. Satoi rankasti niin että
sadepisarat ratisivat vasten arkun kantta. Se vain oli varmaa: tuo
ihmisjoukko ei ollut saapunut kirkolle kauniin ilman vuoksi, olkoon
syy heidän tuloonsa mikä hyvänsä.

Mutta näyttipä siltä, kuin ei kukaan olisi välittänyt sateesta eikä

tuulesta tänä päivänä. Väki seisoi hiljaa ja kärsivällisesti taivasalla
etsimättäkään suojaa kirkosta tai pitäjäntuvalta.

Kantajat sekä muutkin, jotka olivat kerääntyneet Katrinan arkun

ympärille, huomasivat, että toisetkin pukit olivat asetetut ulos paitsi
niitä, joilla Katrinan arkku lepäsi. Toinenkin ruumis oli siis siunattava.
Siitäkään he eivät olleet kuulleet mitään. Eikä mitään
ruumissaattoakaan näyttänyt olevan tulossa. Aika oli muuten jo niin
pitkälle kulunut, että sen olisi pitänyt olla paikalla.

Kun kello oli kymmenen minuuttia vailla kymmenen, ja lähtö

hautuumaalle saattoi tapahtua milloin tahansa, huomasivat
askedalilaiset, että kaikki lähestyivät Nolin taloa, joka sijaitsi vain
parin minuutin matkan päässä kirkolta.
 He näkivät nyt, vaikkeivät he tähän asti olleet sitä
huomanneetkaan, että pitäjäntuvalta oli siroitettu kuusenhakoja aina
talon päärakennuksen eteen saakka, ja oven molemmin puolin oli
pystytetty kuusia. Siellä oli siis ruumis talossa. Mutta sittenkään he
eivät voineet käsittää, miten he eivät olleet kuulleet mitään
kuolemantapauksesta sellaisessa talossa. Eikä ikkunoissa
myöskään ollut hursteja, niinkuin tulee olla, kun kuolema käy talossa.

Nyt eteisen ovet avattiin selkosen selälleen ja ulos tuli sittenkin

ruumissaatto. Nolin August astui ensimäisenä surusauva kädessä, ja
hänen jäljessään kantajat arkkuineen.

Saattoon yhtyi sitten koko ihmisjoukko, joka oli odottanut kirkon

edustalla. Tämän vainajan vuoksi he siis olivat saapuneet kirkolle.

He kantoivat arkun pitäjäntuvan edustalle ja laskivat sen toisen

arkun oikealle puolelle. Nolin August siirsi pukkeja, niin että
molemmat arkut joutuivat aivan rinnakkain.

Myöhempi arkku ei ollut yhtä uusi ja kiiltävä kuin Katrinan. Se oli

varmaan saanut monta sadekuuroa kestää jo ennen tätä päivää. Sitä
oli varomattomasti käsitelty, niin että se oli saanut naarmuja ja
kolauksia.

Kaikki askedalilaiset vetivät syvältä henkeään, sillä nyt he alkoivat

ymmärtää. Tuossa arkussa ei maannut ketään Nolin Augustin
sukulaista. Ei minkään suurmiehen vuoksi noin paljon ihmisiä ollut
saapunut kirkolle.

Nyt kaikkien katseet kulkivat Klara Gullaan, nähdäkseen

ymmärsikö hänkin, mistä oli kysymys. Ja hänestä saattoikin selvästi
huomata, että hänkin sen ymmärsi.
 Hän oli seisonut kalpeana ja itkettyneenä kaiken aikaa äitinsä
arkun vieressä, ja kun hän nyt tunsi toisen arkun, jota he kantoivat
Nolin talosta, näytti tämä iloinen yllätys saattavan hänet aivan pois
suunniltaan, niinkuin voi käydä, kun vihdoin saa sen, mitä kauan on
odottanut. Mutta hän rauhoittui pian. Hän hymyili surun voittoisesti ja
siveli pari kertaa hiljaa arkun kantta. »Nyt sinun on oikein hyvä olla»,
näytti hän aikovan sanoa kuolleelle äidillensä.

Nolin August astui Klara Gullan luo ja otti häntä kädestä.

»Ei suinkaan Klara Gullalla ole mitään sitä vastaan, että

järjestimme asiat täten», sanoi hän. »Me löysimme hänet vasta
perjantaina. Arvelin, että se täten olisi Klara Gullalle helpompi.»

Klara Gulla vastasi vain pari sanaa. Ja huulet vapisivat, niin että
niitä tuskin saattoi kuulla.

»Kiitos! Hyvähän se on. Tiedänhän, ettei hän tule minun, vaan

äidin luokse.»

»Hän tulee teidän kummankin luo, sen Klara Gulla saa nähdä»,
sanoi
Nolin August.

Fallan vanha emäntä, joka oli kahdeksankymmenen vuoden

vanha ja monien surujen murtama, oli myös tullut kirkolle
kunnioittamaan Katrinaa, joka niin kauan oli palvellut häntä
uskollisesti ja ollut hänen hyvä ystävänsä. Hän oli ottanut mukaansa
keisarikepin ja hatun, jotka olivat annetut hänelle takaisin. Hän aikoi
laskea ne hautaan Katrinan viereen. Hän arveli, että Katrina
kernaasti tahtoisi saada läheisyyteensä jotain, mikä muistutti
Jannea.
 Nyt Klara Gulla astui hänen luokseen ja pyysi saada keisarikalut,
ja sitten hän asetti pitkän kepin pystyyn Jannen arkkua vasten ja
hatun sen päähän. Väki ymmärsi hänen ajattelevan sitä, ettei hän
ollut antanut Jannen kulkea keisarikoreudessaan palattuansa kotiin.
Hän tahtoi hyvittää sen verran kuin hän saattoi. Paljon ei kuolleen
hyväksi voi tehdä.

Tuskin oli keppi pystytetty arkun viereen, kun kirkon kellot alkoivat
soida, ja samalla tulivat pappi ja lukkari ja suntio sakaristosta ja
asettuivat saaton etunenään.

Sade virtasi kuurottain sinä päivänä, ja kaikeksi onneksi se piti

hiukan väliä, kun seurakunta järjestyi riviin, ensin miehet ja sitten
vaimoväki, ja valmistui saattamaan näitä kahta vanhusta hautaan.

Ne, jotka asettuivat saattoon, näyttivät ikäänkuin itsekin

ihmettelevän sitä, että olivat täällä mukana. Sillä eivät he juuri mitään
surua tunteneet, eivätkä liioin tahtoneet osoittaa kunnioitustaan
kummallekaan vainajalle. Asian laita oli vain sellainen, että kun tieto
oli levinnyt pitkin pitäjää, että Skrolyckan Janne oli löytynyt juuri
sopivaan aikaan, jotta hänet voitaisiin haudata yhteen hautaan kuin
Katrinakin, oli siinä kaikkien mielestä ollut jotain kaunista ja
ihmeellistä, ja he olivat halunneet nähdä, miten kuolema yhdistäisi
jälleen nuo vanhat aviopuolisot.

Eihän kukaan voinut aavistaa, että niin monet ajattelisivat aivan

samoin. Nyt oli nostettu melkein liiaksi melua kahdesta niin köyhästä
ja alhaisesta ihmisestä. Ihmiset katsoivat toisiinsa ja olivat hiukan
häpeissänsä, mutta kun he nyt kerran olivat siellä, niin oli myös
pakko lähteä hautausmaalle.
 Täytyihän heidän itsekseen hiukan hymyilläkin koko asialle, kun
he tulivat ajatelleeksi, että tämä olisi Portugallian keisarille ollutkin
hyvin mieleen. Kahta surusauvaa, sillä toinen oli seurannut
Askedalista mukana, kannettiin hänen ja Katrinan arkun edellä ja
melkein koko pitäjä seurasi mukana saattojoukossa. Sen paremmin
ei olisi voinut käydä, vaikka hän itse olisi saanut olla mukana
järjestämässä.

Ja kukapa tietää, vaikka se olisi ollutkin hänen tointaan. Hän oli

tullut niin kummalliseksi kuolemansa jälkeen, tuo vanha keisari. Hän
oli varmaan jotain sillä tarkoittanut, että oli antanut tyttären niin
kauan odottaa itseänsä, ja aivan varmasti oli joku tarkoitus siinäkin,
että hän oli tullut syvyydestä esiin juuri parhaaseen aikaan.

Kun he kaikki olivat saapuneet leveän haudan partaalle ja arkut

olivat lasketut maan poveen, alkoi lukkari laulaa: »Ma kuljen kohti
kuolemaa ‒ ‒ ‒»

Lukkari Svartling oli tähän aikaan vanha mies. Hänen laulunsa toi
Klara Gullan mieleen toisen vanhan miehen, jonka laulua hän ei ollut
tahtonut kuunnella.

Tuo ajatus tuotti hänelle suurta tuskaa. Hän puristi kädet

sydäntään vastaan ja sulki silmänsä, jotta ne eivät ilmaisisi, miten
syvästi hän kärsi.

Hänen seisoessaan siinä silmät ummessa hän näki edessään

isänsä kasvot, sellaisina kuin ne Klara Gullan nuorena ollessa olivat
olleet ja jolloin isä ja tytär olivat niin hyviä ystäviä.

Hän näki ne sellaisina kuin ne olivat eräänä aamuna kovan

lumituiskun jälkeen, jolloin tiet olivat ummessa ja isän oli täytynyt
kantaa hänet kirkkoon.

Hän näki ne edessään sellaisina, kuin ne olivat sinä päivänä,

jolloin Klara Gulla meni kirkolle punaisessa leningissään. Ei kukaan
ollut näyttänyt niin onnelliselta ja hyvältä kuin Janne sillä kertaa.
Sitten Jannen onni oli sammunut, eikä Klara Gullakaan ollut enää
oikein tyytyväinen.

Klara Gulla koetti pysyttää silmiensä edessä nämä kasvot. Ne

tekivät hänelle niin hyvää. Katsellessaan niitä nousi voimakas
hellyyden aalto hänen rinnastansa.

Nuo kasvot tahtoivat hänelle vain hyvää. Niitä ei tarvinnut lainkaan

pelätä.

Sehän oli vain vanha, kiltti Skrolyckan Janne. Ei hän tahtonut

tuomita Klara Gullaa, ei hän tahtonut saattaa onnettomuutta ja
rangaistusta ainoalle lapselleen.

Klara Gulla tuli niin ihmeellisen rauhalliseksi. Hän oli tullut keskelle
rakkauden maailmaa, nyt kun hän saattoi nähdä isänsä sellaisena
kuin hän oli ollut ennen. Mitenkä hän saattoi olettaa, että isä vihaisi
häntä? Hän tahtoi vain antaa anteeksi.

Minne ikänä Klara Gulla meni ja mitä ikänä hän teki, siellä isäkin
tahtoi olla ja suojella häntä. Ei hän pyytänyt mitään muuta.

Vieläkin kerran Klara Gulla tunsi suuren hellyydentunteen

kohoavan sydämestään kuin valtavan aallon ja täyttävän koko hänen
olentonsa. Ja samalla hän tiesi, että kaikki oli hyvin. Nyt hän ja isä
olivat yksi, niinkuin ennenkin. Nyt, kun Klara Gulla rakasti häntä, ei
mitään sovitettavaa enää ollut.
 Klara Gulla heräsi ikäänkuin unesta. Hänen katsellessaan isänsä
hyviä kasvoja oli pappi suorittanut hautauksen. Ja nyt hän lausui pari
sanaa kokoontuneelle kansalle. Hän kiitti heitä, että he olivat tulleet
niin lukuisin joukoin näihin hautajaisiin. Mies, joka täällä oli vihitty
lepoon, ei ollut suuri eikä ylhäinen, mutta ei kellään koko
paikkakunnalla ollut niin lämmintä ja rikasta sydäntä kuin hänellä.

Sitten hän lausui myös pari sanaa Klara Gullalle. Hän oli saanut
osakseen suurempaa rakkautta vanhemmiltaan kuin kukaan muu
hänen tietääksensä, ja sellaisen rakkauden täytyi kääntyä
siunaukseksi.

Kun pappi sanoi sen, käänsivät kaikki katseensa Klara Gullaan ja

he ihmettelivät sitä näkyä, mikä heitä nyt kohtasi.

Siinä Skrolyckan Klara Fina Gulleborg, joka oli saanut nimensä

itse auringon mukaan, seisoi vanhempiensa haudalla ja hänen
kasvonsa loistivat ikäänkuin ne olisivat olleet kirkastuneet.

Hän oli yhtä kaunis kuin sinä sunnuntaina, jolloin hän tuli kirkolle
punaisessa leningissään, jollei vielä paljoa kauniimpikin.
 *** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK
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