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Artisans in Early Imperial China
Early China is best known for the dazzling material artifacts it has left behind. These terracotta figures, gilt-bronze lamps, and other material remnants of the Chinese past unearthed by archaeological excavations are often viewed without regard to the social context of their creation, yet they were made by individuals who contributed greatly to the foundations of early Chinese culture. With Artisans in Early Imperial China, Anthony Barbieri-Low combines historical, epigraphic, and archaeological analysis to refocus our gaze from the glittering objects and monuments of China onto the men and women who made them.Taking readers inside the private workshops, crowded marketplaces, and great palaces, temples, and tombs of early China, Barbieri-Low explores the lives and working conditions of artisans, meticulously documenting their role in early Chinese society and the economy. First published in 2007, winner of top prizes from the Association for Asian Studies, American Historical Association, College Art Association, and the International Convention of Asia Scholars, and now back in print, Artisans in Early Imperial China will appeal to anyone interested in Chinese history, as well as to scholars of comparative social history, labor history, and Asian art history.
- GenresHistory
404 pages, Kindle Edition
First published November 29, 2007
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33 people want to read
About the author
Anthony Barbieri-Low
6 books2 followersProfessor Anthony Barbieri-Low has a wide-ranging interests in many aspects of Early China, including technology, organization of production, labor history, gender and social relations, legal process, material culture, and state formation. He teaches undergraduate courses in East Asian civilization, world civilization, and early Chinese history, and graduate courses in specialized topics related to ancient China at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
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September 28, 2012
Anthony Barbieri-Low’s book represents a continuing trend in art history: to give a human dimension to art objects. Instead of focusing on the objects and their users, Barbieri-Low incorporates serendipitous archaeological findings of ancient artisan workshops and habitation sites (serendipitous because of the Chinese archaeological focus on elite tombs and objects best suited for museum displays) with historical texts to tell the stories about the humans who made a living by making these objects. In so doing, Barbiri-Low not only aims to reconstruct the social contexts where the artisans lived and produced their art but also to use these concrete examples to participate the on-going discussions in economic history and labor history.
Barbieri-Low organizes this book thematically with each theme focuses on one aspect of the lives of the artisans in Qin and Han China: social status, normal working conditions, participation in the market economy, relations with the court, and the lives of the conscripted artisans, convicts, and slaves who worked for the government initiated projects. The advantage of thematic organization is numerous. First of all, it allows the reader to see artisans as the center of the discussion instead of the invisible hands behind the art they’ve created. Once we start to ask questions about the artisans who made those art objects that animated our imagination of the past, many of our false concepts about the early imperial China crumple. For example, the meaning of artisan (mostly gong, but sometimes used interchangeably with jiang) during Qin and Han refers to a broad range of workers who engaged in various productions like lacquer, bamboo, stone-carving, iron, and etc. Though artisan has never been viewed as an honored class in early imperial China, a careful examination of the inscriptions they left on their art, the daybooks they’ve used, and a critical reading of written texts disclose to us the reality that the stigma associated with the word ‘artisan’ was probably accrued over time and remained merely a literati view. More likely, the artisans were middle-class workers with some kind of artisan literacy, neither the idealized transmitter of the saintly knowledge nor the despised social caste who were confined to their trade by birth.
Another advantage of thematic organization is the convenience to engage with on-going academic debates. Barbieri-Low’s examination of the Qin and Han artisans’ (or more precisely gu and gong who participated in the official markets) brand-consciousness and advertising jingles in the market, the official rules and regulations of the market, and the complex marketing and trading system that helped the circulation of art objects reveal to us a “precociously modern economic world of early imperial china” (p.29). In these markets, not only the artisans themselves were highly aware of commercial competitions but also the government developed sophisticated regulations and rules aimed at maintaining market stability and proper taxing. As such, Barbieri-Low solidly situates himself in the modernist camp in the debate about the economy of the ancient world. When looking into the archaeological sites of artisan workshops (both independent and official), traces left behind by independent female artisans like Meng Ao and Mu Yi also disclose a different world than the sanctioned official narrative of patriarchy in later writings, hinting the rise of patriarchal narrative emerged around the later Han period.
The human-centered themes also allow us to appreciate the complex social reality subsumed by the label ‘artisan’. Roughly speaking there are at least three different categories of artisans who engaged in the government-sponsored large projects like those under the Iron Monopoly Office. The conscripted artisans were typically called to duty during the first month of the lunar year while the convicted artisans and government slaves worked all year around. The convicts generally worked on the most dangerous and onerous jobs while the governmental slaves took on the easier roles like supervising (male) and cooking (female). The examination of the living and working conditions of various types of artisans also indirectly informs us about a government that was capable of shrewd calculations of how to maximally extract labor from its subjects without upsetting the rhythm of the agricultural economy or fostering revolts.
Despite these advantages of the human-centered thematic organization, the short-coming of this approach is also evident. While it is easy to imagine what it was like to live as an artisan during the Qin and Han period, it is difficult to understand how things changed as the time went by. A more worrisome feature is how generalizable are the claims made based on limited examples. Despite an extensive use of legal and historical texts, Barbieri-Low’s archaeological sources are confined to a few workshops, markets and habitation sites. Thus, it is difficult to generalize the findings of precocious market consciousness of artisans in the Northeast China as an indication to a ‘modernist’ market-consciousness in early imperial China because we do not know how uneven the economy in each region of China was, how integrated was the artisans’ work with the economy in each region, and how interconnected the economies in different regions were. Hence, despite Barbieri-Low’s own conviction of a precocious modern economy in Qin and Han China, what we can conclude from the data is that, in the markets under examination, and in terms of the buying and selling art objects, the price was most likely set through market-competition instead of tradition and law. As such, Barbieri-Low’s contribution in the debate of economic history is not his conclusion but the concrete examples that demand a more nuanced look into the economy of early imperial China that includes findings about artisans’ market consciousness.
Barbieri-Low’s treatment of the jingles is also problematic. While we have evidence to believe that modern Cantonese is closer to Tang pronunciation, it’s a bit hasty to conclude that the jingles rhyme using Cantonese without first look into possibilities of local dialects. This is not merely a hair-splitting issue in language. Rather, it can reflect whether the artisans’ market consciousness was merely regional (therefore only using the jingles rhyme in local dialect and making local counterfeits of the state-brand) or truly ‘national’ (therefore using the jingles rhyme in the official pronunciations). Overall, Barbieri-Low’s argument regarding the efficient labor practice of Han government is the most convincing case because it illustrates the art of governance through scrutiny of the government-run workshops without too many generalizations.
Shortcomings aside, Barbieri-Low’s book is the first to fill the lacuna of the lives of these forgotten artisans, to point out the need to construct a history of artisans through coordinated effort of archaeologists, art historians, and historians of economy and labor, and how such a history will help reveal the historical realities. His examination of the artisans’ religious practices is also potentially useful for discussions of history of religion in early imperial China.
---Plus, my colleague/classmate Ryan convinced me the value of discriptive history, and we need to read in a different mode when approaching this book. If read this way, this book is immensely enjoyable to read and to think about. The jingles of artisans in early imperial china ...
Barbieri-Low organizes this book thematically with each theme focuses on one aspect of the lives of the artisans in Qin and Han China: social status, normal working conditions, participation in the market economy, relations with the court, and the lives of the conscripted artisans, convicts, and slaves who worked for the government initiated projects. The advantage of thematic organization is numerous. First of all, it allows the reader to see artisans as the center of the discussion instead of the invisible hands behind the art they’ve created. Once we start to ask questions about the artisans who made those art objects that animated our imagination of the past, many of our false concepts about the early imperial China crumple. For example, the meaning of artisan (mostly gong, but sometimes used interchangeably with jiang) during Qin and Han refers to a broad range of workers who engaged in various productions like lacquer, bamboo, stone-carving, iron, and etc. Though artisan has never been viewed as an honored class in early imperial China, a careful examination of the inscriptions they left on their art, the daybooks they’ve used, and a critical reading of written texts disclose to us the reality that the stigma associated with the word ‘artisan’ was probably accrued over time and remained merely a literati view. More likely, the artisans were middle-class workers with some kind of artisan literacy, neither the idealized transmitter of the saintly knowledge nor the despised social caste who were confined to their trade by birth.
Another advantage of thematic organization is the convenience to engage with on-going academic debates. Barbieri-Low’s examination of the Qin and Han artisans’ (or more precisely gu and gong who participated in the official markets) brand-consciousness and advertising jingles in the market, the official rules and regulations of the market, and the complex marketing and trading system that helped the circulation of art objects reveal to us a “precociously modern economic world of early imperial china” (p.29). In these markets, not only the artisans themselves were highly aware of commercial competitions but also the government developed sophisticated regulations and rules aimed at maintaining market stability and proper taxing. As such, Barbieri-Low solidly situates himself in the modernist camp in the debate about the economy of the ancient world. When looking into the archaeological sites of artisan workshops (both independent and official), traces left behind by independent female artisans like Meng Ao and Mu Yi also disclose a different world than the sanctioned official narrative of patriarchy in later writings, hinting the rise of patriarchal narrative emerged around the later Han period.
The human-centered themes also allow us to appreciate the complex social reality subsumed by the label ‘artisan’. Roughly speaking there are at least three different categories of artisans who engaged in the government-sponsored large projects like those under the Iron Monopoly Office. The conscripted artisans were typically called to duty during the first month of the lunar year while the convicted artisans and government slaves worked all year around. The convicts generally worked on the most dangerous and onerous jobs while the governmental slaves took on the easier roles like supervising (male) and cooking (female). The examination of the living and working conditions of various types of artisans also indirectly informs us about a government that was capable of shrewd calculations of how to maximally extract labor from its subjects without upsetting the rhythm of the agricultural economy or fostering revolts.
Despite these advantages of the human-centered thematic organization, the short-coming of this approach is also evident. While it is easy to imagine what it was like to live as an artisan during the Qin and Han period, it is difficult to understand how things changed as the time went by. A more worrisome feature is how generalizable are the claims made based on limited examples. Despite an extensive use of legal and historical texts, Barbieri-Low’s archaeological sources are confined to a few workshops, markets and habitation sites. Thus, it is difficult to generalize the findings of precocious market consciousness of artisans in the Northeast China as an indication to a ‘modernist’ market-consciousness in early imperial China because we do not know how uneven the economy in each region of China was, how integrated was the artisans’ work with the economy in each region, and how interconnected the economies in different regions were. Hence, despite Barbieri-Low’s own conviction of a precocious modern economy in Qin and Han China, what we can conclude from the data is that, in the markets under examination, and in terms of the buying and selling art objects, the price was most likely set through market-competition instead of tradition and law. As such, Barbieri-Low’s contribution in the debate of economic history is not his conclusion but the concrete examples that demand a more nuanced look into the economy of early imperial China that includes findings about artisans’ market consciousness.
Barbieri-Low’s treatment of the jingles is also problematic. While we have evidence to believe that modern Cantonese is closer to Tang pronunciation, it’s a bit hasty to conclude that the jingles rhyme using Cantonese without first look into possibilities of local dialects. This is not merely a hair-splitting issue in language. Rather, it can reflect whether the artisans’ market consciousness was merely regional (therefore only using the jingles rhyme in local dialect and making local counterfeits of the state-brand) or truly ‘national’ (therefore using the jingles rhyme in the official pronunciations). Overall, Barbieri-Low’s argument regarding the efficient labor practice of Han government is the most convincing case because it illustrates the art of governance through scrutiny of the government-run workshops without too many generalizations.
Shortcomings aside, Barbieri-Low’s book is the first to fill the lacuna of the lives of these forgotten artisans, to point out the need to construct a history of artisans through coordinated effort of archaeologists, art historians, and historians of economy and labor, and how such a history will help reveal the historical realities. His examination of the artisans’ religious practices is also potentially useful for discussions of history of religion in early imperial China.
---Plus, my colleague/classmate Ryan convinced me the value of discriptive history, and we need to read in a different mode when approaching this book. If read this way, this book is immensely enjoyable to read and to think about. The jingles of artisans in early imperial china ...
November 20, 2012
Easy to read book. I was hoping for a little more information on the actual artwork. Instead, the book focuses on the lifes of the artisans. If I had to pick a favorite part, it would be the discussion on the lacquerwork.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews