THE giving of gifts and charitable relief was a fundamental aspect of both political and social authority in Han China as well as the Roman Empire. However, while the Roman case has been the object of considerable study, the Han case, despite an abundance of references to the topic, has been largely ignored.1 In this chapter I will sketch the range of references to gifts and charity by the emperor, the imperial elite, and local elites of Han China and suggest a few of the major differences from the Roman case.
Gift giving as a mode of authority had a considerable history in preimperial China. Most importantly, the bronzes that are our key written source for the Western Zhou dynasty (c.1045–771 B.C.E.) are devoted largely to recording royal gifts to the nobility, which served as permanent charters for noble status and privilege. The fundamental political role of such gifts is theorized in several passages in the fourth century B.C.E. Zuozhuan. In the Spring and Autumn period (771–481 B.C.E.), the political power of the hegemon, the militarily dominant state ruler who in name remained subordinate to the Zhou king, was also strongly identified with a beneficent mode of action, the restoration or preservation of perishing states. While this was not explicitly charity or gift, from early times it came to be described as a form of de, which by the middle of the Warring States period was glossed as actions of generosity or the giving of life by the ruler who gained the support or loyalty of the people. Even more explicit is the relation between masters and clients (ke) that came to be fundamental to political and social status in the Warring States and remained so throughout the period of the Han dynasty. In this relation the master provided food and lodging for his guest–retainers, who served him in a variety of ways such as entertainment, debt collection, and assassination. Finally, political power was theorized in several traditions as the pairing of “punishment (xing)” and “life–giving” or “generosity (de),” and this model informed the calendars of royal activity that were included in several major works of the period. The de described in this literature ranged from the granting of life through acts of deliberate mercy to material payments and gifts from the ruler to his allies and subordinates.2
In the imperial period gift giving became definitive of the Chinese emperor’s role, as is clearly shown in the “Fundamental Chronicles (benji)” of the dynastic histories. These chronicles of court activities focus on the emperor’s acts and decrees, and gift giving in all its forms is the single most frequently noted type of action. Imperial gifts and charity included at least the following eight types.
First, the emperor bestowed ranks in a seventeen- or twenty–rank hierarchy (the number shifted across time) that established the hierarchical positions of all free males in the empire. These ranks had originated in the Warring States period as rewards for military service or for providing grain for the army, and they had become the structuring principle of the Qin state from the middle of the fourth century B.C.E. They were closely linked to the emperor’s right to make appointments, and the higher ranks in the hierarchy were calqued onto the hierarchy of bureaucratic offices. They were carried forward into the early empires and remained a major structuring principle of the state at least into the beginning of the Eastern Han in the early first century C.E. In the Qin period such ranks entailed the right to own specified amounts of land and command the services of a specified number of servile laborers (probably convicts or captives). In the Han period the primary benefit of rank holding, apart from status in the local community, was privileged treatment in law, as certain punishments could be redeemed through the surrender of ranks. Posthumously awarded ranks could also be transferred to descendants, who would similarly benefit from them.3
As military service became less important under the Han, with the concentration of fighting at the frontiers where peasant levies were of no use, the ranks were primarily awarded on happy occasions in the “family” life of the emperor, such as the birth of a son or the establishment of an heir, so they became a form of largesse that united the emperor with his people in shared celebration.4 Many occasions on which ranks were granted included the distribution of wine and meat to local communities for purposes of the celebration, with the quantities given to each individual determined by rank, as is indicated in a math primer that gave problems in dividing up meat depending on the ranks of those present.
This shift from rewards for military service to periodic “universal” awards is conventionally treated as a decline from the original purpose of encouraging military service, but the development actually made it more explicitly a ranking of the entire society through imperial gifts that flowed to all adult males. Moreover, since at this time ranks were largely universally awarded for empire–wide events, rather than bestowed on individuals for their specific achievements, the rankings in the Han came to closely coincide with age. Consequently, the system reinforced the Han policy of honoring the aged and the general emphasis on age as a basis of status and authority in the village community. Other gifts that were specifically targeted to the aged as elements of this policy will be discussed below.5
This was the closest that Han China had to a distinctive public realm that included a significant percentage of the population, as opposed to the narrowly defined “public” realm consisting of the ruler, his family, and those employed by the state. Through these ranks, which were regularly issued, included in all the records that the state kept of its subjects, marked status in recurrent local celebrations, and bestowed clear legal privileges, the emperor’s beneficence was made visible at the local level, and his role as patron or protector of the common people was given manifest institutional expression. The hierarchy constituted through these ranks was also intended to dictate the terms in which people were to be graded and judged. This vision of the social order was articulated in a memorial by Chao Cuo, who posited a radical tension between an ideal but unrealized “public” order marked by the law and ranks and a subversive order constituted through private wealth and official corruption that pervaded actual customs and values:
Now the laws debase merchants, but merchants have become rich and honored. The laws honor peasants, but peasants have become poor and base. Thus what is honored by current custom (su) is treated by the ruler as base, while those who are scorned by the minor officials are honored by the law. With proper hierarchy thus inverted, and standards of good and bad perverted, it is impossible for the state to be prosperous and laws enforced.
The most important task at the moment is simply to cause the people to devote themselves to agriculture. To achieve this, grain must be made more valuable. The way to make grain valuable is to allow the people to use it to secure rewards and redemptions from punishments. If you call on the people of the empire to present grain to the local officials, and thereby to be given ranks and also to redeem crimes [which was a function of ranks], then rich people will have ranks, peasants will have money, and grain can be dispensed [to the needy]. Those who are able to submit grain to receive ranks are those with surpluses. If one takes grain from those with surpluses to contribute it to the emperor’s use, then exactions on the poor can be reduced. This is what is called taking away from those with surplus to supplement those in need.6
This complicated argument posits a complete opposition between the mores of the time and the conduct of subordinate officials, on the one hand, and the proper order posited by law and the emperor’s gifts, on the other. It presents a method of modifying the practice or awarding gifts—both the grant of titles and the redemption of punishments, which was the primary mode of using titles—so that they could become valuable in the marketplace, which Chao Cuo recognized as the true locus of popular values and judgment. A similar combination of imperial gifts—in the form of pardons for capital crimes, redemption from penal servitude, and the award and sale of titles—and the manipulation of people’s desire for wealth was suggested by Chao Cuo as a method for attracting population to settle on the frontiers to provide for defense against the Xiongnu.7
The reference to pardons for capital crimes leads to the second major form of imperial gift, which was precisely the ruler’s power to issue pardons to those condemned to death or penal servitude. Such pardons were a regular feature of imperial policy, with empire–wide pardons—that included all people in the empire awaiting execution, except for those convicted for treason—being issued on average every three years over the course of the Han dynasty. The treatment of those pardoned varied, but in general those sentenced to death had their sentence commuted to servile labor or service in the army (see below), while those sentenced to servile labor had the physical marks of their conditions—iron collars, red clothing, shaved beards and heads—removed but continued to perform labor for the government for the period of the sentence. So–called “great” acts of grace led to the actual release of servile laborers, and some of these acts were extended even to those condemned for treason. Fugitives were in general freed from any future prosecution and thus able to return home. Interestingly, many of these pardons were accompanied by the issuing of ranks to free people, as well as gifts of grain or cloth to paupers, widows, and other impoverished categories. The practice of regular universal pardons seems to have been an innovation of the early imperial period, although this may simply reflect the lack of solid documentation from the Warring States period.
In addition to universal pardons, there were also more specific pardons restricted to a specified region or category of the population. Yet a third type of pardon was the policy of “inspection of cases” in which special agents of the emperor toured the local administrative cities to verify that punishments were correct and to overrule any cases of perceived injustice or excessive severity. In the later Han this became a ritual performed as one element of attempts to relieve drought in which the emperor personally visited prisons and bestowed free acts of grace on those being held on suspicion of relatively light crimes. A version of this clemency restricted to members of the elite was the regular practice of the emperor granting officials the right to kill themselves—involving a ritual presentation of a sword to cut one’s throat and bowl to catch the blood—rather than suffer the humiliation of public execution or a punishment of physical mutilation such as castration.8
The reasons for this policy of routine pardons are not entirely clear and may have varied across time. All recorded cases justified the acts as responses either to happy events—capping of an heir, establishment of a capital city, naming of an empress, marvelous events that indicated celestial approval—or to misfortunes—floods, droughts, marvelous events that indicated celestial condemnation. However, there are many records of such events that do not elicit a pardon, so it seems that all of these were possible occasions for an act of grace but not a sufficient motive. Several recorded parts of decrees suggest that the acts were intended to reduce popular discontent, which could manifest itself “magically” in inauspicious events or more realistically in banditry and rebellion. It is notable that pardons were invariably given in the spring or summer, the seasons of growth and life that in the ritual calendars of the period were to be devoted to the life–giving aspects of the emperor’s role.
Another significant point is that several of the decrees, as well as the aforementioned policy of “inspection of cases,” indicate suspicion that local officials manipulated the law to their own benefit. This same suspicion of officials acting at odds with the law and the emperor’s will was articulated above in Chao Cuo’s memorial. Finally, in the Eastern Han, when the bestowal of great acts of grace became routine, these pardons became a regular source of manpower for the frontier armies, which were continually restocked with men pardoned for capital offences.9 In conclusion, it seems that the Han emperors clearly recognized the need to balance the severity of their legal administration, which was the physical foundation of their state, with regular manifestations of beneficence in the form of pardons, grants of titles, poor relief, and related acts of manifest generosity. Such acts were also one aspect of the policy of assimilating the status of the emperor to that of Heaven, which over the course of the year balanced the bestowing of life and vitality in the spring and summer with the killing of living things in the autumn and winter.10
The practice of poor relief was the third major aspect of Han imperial gift giving. The above discussion touched on the combination of pardons with gifts to stipulated categories of the poor, and records of such gifts of food or clothing appear frequently in the chronicles. The gifts of wine and meat for public celebrations in association with the granting of titles were a related activity. The aforementioned policy of honoring the aged was supposed to include providing foods of varying quantities for those above certain ages, although memorials indicate that this policy soon fell into abeyance as local officials replaced grain with chaff. The famous institution of the “Ever–Normal Granaries” that bought up grain in times of abundance to release it at lower prices in times of scarcity was also in theory a means of benefiting the poor.11 However, probably the single most important form of poor relief, and the one that consumed the greatest amount of the government’s wealth, was the policy of providing assistance to regions afflicted with flood or drought. This included tax relief, the issuing of grain, moving populations to unaffected areas, and the distribution of money to victims so that they could purchase grain in the regions to which they temporarily moved.12
A fourth form of gift giving to the peasants was the distribution of land. This activity is particularly notable in debates over the problem of imperial hunting parks and state pasturelands for army horses, both of which were constantly targets of calls that they be pared away through distribution to needy peasants. Equally significant was the distribution to peasants of land that had been confiscated from high officials, nobles, and the kin of eunuchs who had fallen afoul of the law or a political purge. Rather than having the land worked by convicts or state slaves, which seems to have been inefficient, the state rapidly divided such land into small plots and awarded it to peasants from overcrowded regions. Gifts of land, grain, and livestock, as well as cash payments, were also frequently offered to colonists who were willing to settle at the frontiers. As a correlate of this policy, the Western Han state repeatedly attempted to restrict the scale of landholdings by the wealthy, although this policy was generally ineffective and was abandoned in the Eastern Han. Nobles and officials, who were presumed to be acting on the model provided by the emperor, were also recorded distributing some of their lands to needy neighbors.13
A fifth and final mode of gift giving to peasants was the regular gifts that were not mentioned in the “Chronicles” since they were routine. The most distinctive of these were the presentations to the aged, which included giving dove–staffs to anyone who had reached the age of seventy, as well as a staff and arm rest to individuals who were no longer required to attend court. (The choice of doves in the decoration of the staffs is explained in several ways, the most persuasive of which is that they were a bird associated with spring and the rejuvenation of life.) The dove–staffs would have been yet another distinctive and visible sign of the imperial presence in the village community, for even relatively small villages would have had a few individuals who reached the age of seventy and hence were entitled to carry the staff. Like all objects associated with the emperor, these staffs would have been charged with a numinous power and prestige. This is clearly shown in a legal case recorded on some writing strips discovered in a Han tomb. An official struck an old man, thus causing him to drop his staff, which broke when it fell to the ground. Since the object was a gift of the emperor, the official was executed for having broken it.14
In addition to these five modes of distributing honors and goods to commoners, the emperor also showed conspicuous generosity to officials and nobles. Apart from bestowing additional ranks on his officials, just as he did to the commoners, and to paying their salaries, which was also a form of imperial generosity, the emperor also gave frequent gifts to all officials or to chosen individuals. These gifts were most commonly cash, as was presumably their salaries, which were formally measured in quantities of grain, but not infrequently the emperor also gave specified amounts of precious metals, especially gold. This practice dated back to the Warring States period, when precious metals were used as special gifts awarded to officials whom the ruler wished to honor. In addition to gifts cited in the “Chronicles,” some biographies of officials also describe receiving such gifts from the emperor, usually when the official retired. As will be discussed below, these gifts were sometimes in turn distributed by the official to his family or neighbors, so that the official acted as a conduit that directed imperial charity downward to the common people.15
The range of the emperor’s gifts also extended to the non–Chinese peoples at the frontiers of the Han state. These gifts included the heqin offerings of gold, silk, and imperial princesses to the Xiongnu; the presents (largely silk) sent to the rulers of the oasis states of Central Asia (modern Xinjiang) that accepted titular Han sovereignty; money and silk given to surrendered barbarians who agreed to be resettled inside China; and bounties for the heads of Xiongnu paid to tribesman allied to the Han. Thus, any non–Chinese peoples who entered into relations with China—whether as enemies negotiating temporarily peaceful relations, independent states recognizing Han overlordship, or tribes that maintained de facto autonomy while providing military service for the Han—had their position instantiated through the acceptance of some gift from the Han emperor. That these payments were explicitly regarded as gifts is demonstrated by the fact that the Han invariably gave far more than they received in “tribute” payments from the non–Chinese.16 Such routine imbalance would indicate only stupidity if the purpose of these exchanges were economic, as has been posited by many modern scholars. However, in a gift relationship such an imbalance creates a hierarchical relationship in which the one who gives the greater amount places the other in his debt and thereby marks his or her own status as a patron and a superior.
The eighth and final form of the emperor’s gift giving was sacrifices. While one might argue that it is not analytically useful to conflate offerings to spirits with gifts to humans, the fact remains that the foods and material objects presented to deities—as well as human ancestors—were a noncoerced presentation that served to constitute permanent ties between the two parties. Furthermore, it is notable that in China political/social authority was always identified with the right to offer sacrifice: the head of a household, the leader of a region, the ruler of the state, and any other person in charge of a social grouping always served as the chief sacrificer for that group. Thus, the emperor’s power was always justified in part through his unique ability to make offerings to the highest and most powerful deities. In the course of the Han dynasty, the spirit of Heaven was established as the highest god, and the great periurban sacrifice to Heaven became the ultimate religious ritual performed in the Chinese Empire throughout the rest of imperial history.17
More important is the sense that imperial sacrifices are done for the sake of the common good (unlike other forms of sacrifice, which benefited the specific groups who made them), and the proper offerings to Heaven would in theory elicit the bestowal of Heaven’s blessings on the people of the empire in the form of timely rain and abundant harvests. The Han emperor’s sacrifices were thus a form of euergetism in the sense defined by Veyne. It is also worth noting that writers in early imperial Rome explicitly spoke of sacrifice as a form of gift circulation including the ruler, the gods, and the people, for whom the peace of the Principate was a divine gift, and that the description of offerings to the gods as “gifts” (dona) was a conventional usage.18
In addition to all these forms of concrete or institutional gifts, one must also examine the rhetoric of the period. Thus, a request to retire would be described as asking the emperor for the “gift of one’s skeleton,” since the emperor controlled the persons of his officials and had to give them back to their families before they would be allowed to depart from the court. Similarly a reply from the emperor to a memorial from an official was also described as the bestowal of a gift.19 Such phrases are to a certain extent rhetorical, but they are also aspects of the phenomenon noted by Veyne in which the Roman ruler’s very existence and every act that he performed could be treated as an act of benevolence or generosity.20
As noted in the above list, several of the forms of imperial gift giving, such as the distribution of land to peasants, were imitated on a smaller scale or lower level by members of the imperial family or the court. In addition, locally powerful families also engaged in forms of gift giving or charity as an element of their status and power. One recipient of such gifts was the emperor, who received the tribute of goods and people from the different regions of his realm. Another form was the gathering of “guest–retainers (ke),” who continued to be a major element of locally eminent households (as well as urban gangs) in Han China. Particularly in the Eastern Han the practice of local charity and poor relief also figures prominently in the biographic accounts, stone inscriptions, and philosophical essays of the Han great families. The primary recipients of such charitable actions were more distant kinsmen and fellow villagers, but at certain periods they spread more broadly to include whole commanderies. The importance of such activities to the organization and the activities of the Han local elite is one of the major themes of the Han sources from the period, including the stone inscriptions that members of the great families commissioned for their own kin and that thus demonstrate how these people understood the bases of their own eminence.21
Such charity took several forms. First, wealthy men often entertained kin and neighbors in great banquets. In several cases, the wealth for such activities is explicitly described as coming from prior gifts by the emperor or members of the imperial family. One of the most interesting is the case of Shu Guang, who had received a quantity of gold from the emperor as a retirement gift and who used it to feast all his neighbors. When members of his family had the village elders remonstrate that he was wasting too much of his family’s newfound wealth, Shu Guang replied:
How could I be so old and muddleheaded as not to think of my descendants? I have my old fields and shacks, and if my descendants work diligently these are sufficient to provide food and clothing as good as those of ordinary people. If I should increase them in order to have a surplus, I would just cause my descendants to become lazy. For the worthy man, having much wealth diminishes his ambition. For the stupid man, having much wealth augments his faults. Moreover, wealth is what is hated and resented by the masses. Since I am unable to morally transform my descendants, I do not desire to augment their faults and produce resentment against them. Moreover, the money I am spending is what was granted by the sage ruler to nourish his old servant. Therefore I am happy to enjoy what he has given me together with my fellow villagers and members of my patriline, and thus live out my remaining days.22
This is of interest in that it explicitly cites the emperor’s gift giving as the source and pattern for that of Shu Guang, who claims to only be fulfilling the sage ruler’s will. However, this and a handful of related passages are also notable for articulating a theory of gift giving that almost anticipates the model articulated in James Scott’s The Moral Economy of the Peasant.23 Money that is hoarded undermines the character of those who hold it and attracts the resentment of neighbors, whereas money that is distributed in banquets and assistance to the poor secures loyalty and support. This pattern in which wealth at the village level was to a certain degree redistributed through sponsorship of banquets, often in association with local cults, or through helping neighbors in times of emergency, has remained a feature of rural Chinese society down to the present day.
Such feasting also was a part of Han local cults sponsored by powerful landed families and merchants, although such practices are noted only in a few cases where local officials undertook to suppress the cult, which consequently was cited in imperial records.24 In another form of “routine” beneficence, wealthy families adopted orphans or other more distant kin. Closely related, although analytically distinguishable, was the importance of gift giving to high officials, which became in practice little more than bribes, in the attempts of locally important families to secure access to or the support of eminent figures at court.25 Toward the end of the Han local families also became very active in the building of roads, reservoirs, and other facilities for more general use, an activity that was recorded in several funerary inscriptions. Finally, local families increasingly provided famine and flood relief, as well as defense against bandits.
The exact relationship between the emperor’s gift giving and that of the powerful families is not entirely clear and probably shifted across time. On the one hand, many of the charitable actions of the families seem to have been directly patterned on those of the emperor. As noted above, they even claim to be extending or carrying out imperial benefactions, as in the cases of distribution of land to peasants or Shu Guang’s use of an imperial gift to provide banquets for poorer neighbors. However, the emphasis in late Han stories on public works, local military defense, and relief from flood or famine indicates that the locally influential families were directly taking charge of the roles that the imperial state—due to impoverishment and the consequences of military reforms—was no longer capable of handling. This was on the one hand a mode of upholding the court, but it would also have been perceived as a form of usurpation. The links of local gift giving to unsanctioned cults also suggest ways in which the beneficence of the great families was a direct challenge to the imperial order.
Many of the activities described above are not dissimilar to the gift giving or charitable activities of the Roman emperor or the imperial elite. (Due to the easy accessibility of accounts of these activities, I will not recapitulate the major elements.26) However, there are a few differences that clearly relate to the varying structures of the two empires and the defining hallmarks of political authority.
First, public benevolence and charity in the Roman Empire, like that in the Greek world that formed its eastern half, was defined by its urban frame. Veyne’s “euergetism” was inseparable from the city, which was the basic unit of the political order. The same emphasis on the ultimate urban focus of this conduct also figures in Saller’s account of patronage in the early empire.27 The primary forms of public benevolence, both for the ruler and members of the elite, were the construction of new buildings for public use (theaters, gymnasia, baths, arenas for games), the sponsorship of games, and the maintenance of aqueducts and roads. All of these, and additional charities such as the feeding of the specified number of the Roman plebs or charity for poor children provided by interest on loans to farmers, were focused on the cities. They assured the provision of the basic requisites of an existence that was “civilized” in the etymological sense of being urban.
In Han China, on the other hand, the bulk of imperial gift giving and virtually all private offerings went to the countryside. This difference reflects the political distinction between the Roman Empire, which was structured as a multiplicity of urban centers—both old established ones and new ones built to a standard model—and the Chinese Empire, where the political power of the ruler and his agents derived directly from the registration, mobilization, and taxation of rural households.28 The pattern of Roman euergetism carried on the Greek precedent of local regimes formed through groupings of urban notables who demonstrated a devotion to the public good. In contrast, imperial gift giving in the Han dynasty was directed toward the elements of the population who provided the fiscal and military foundations of the state, which is to say the peasantry and the officials whose families and life patterns remained rooted in the rural world (see below).
The differential pattern of gift giving also reflects a difference between the uses of the rural bases of the Roman elite and the Han Chinese. For the former, large estates worked by servile or contract labor and managed by local agents were primarily sources of income that enabled the eminent man to pursue his career in the cities. For the Chinese elite, on the other hand, estates remained relatively small through the process of division among heirs, and the primary source of local influence was the forming of extended social networks on the basis of kin ties, marriage with other leading families, and the patronage offered to poorer neighbors. This required a much more regular presence in the countryside and made the gift giving relations with peasant neighbors described above a crucial element of the great families’ authority.29 As imperial power declined and the great families became responsible for an ever wider range of local governmental functions, this rural focus intensified.
Second, Veyne makes a clear distinction between simple charity to the poor, as exemplified by later Christian practice, and Greek or Roman euergetism, which consisted of making a contribution to a public good shared by all citizens. This depended on the existence of a clearly defined public space that was distinct from government offices, palaces, and temples, a public space that was fashioned and maintained by the elite as the necessary setting for the cultivation and display of their authority.30 Such a public space did not exist in Han China, and there is no evidence at all in the period of specifically urban charity. This would develop only with the rise of Buddhism, with private foundations of temples open to the public, and at roughly the same time with the development of private gardens that similarly evolved into early public parks. Only with the emergence of such new spaces in the fifth and sixth centuries do we begin to find a Chinese version of a distinctive urban public realm.31
The absence of nongovernmental public spaces in Han China was also linked to an absence of monumental building in stone. For reasons that are not entirely clear, whether a scarcity of raw material or simply a choice to build in perishable materials that could readily be rebuilt in the latest style at regular intervals, the Chinese never developed a tradition of building in stone.32 Given the emphasis on private or imperial donations to the public good, much euergetism in the Mediterranean consisted in the building of great stone structures inscribed with the name and purposes of the donor. It is for this reason that we possess the masses of stone inscriptions from which one can reconstruct so much of Roman and Greek social history, including the history of donations to the public good. The absence of such structures in China, and their associated records of public–spirited conduct, meant that prestige and influence could not be generated through the sponsorship of such buildings and that no honor could be gained by being recorded on them. This led both to radically different modes of experiencing a cityscape and to the development of clearly divergent modes of transforming material wealth into symbolic capital through the agency of benefactions.
Third, the other great form of imperial public benevolence, the sponsorship of games, also entailed a mode of political behavior in Rome that would have been unthinkable in China. Specifically, one of the key aspects of the games sponsored by the emperor was that the ruler himself would have appeared in public and shared the games with the urban populace. This physical presence, as Veyne points out, was essential to the role of the games; the emperor made a gift of his person as much as of the entertainment in the arena proper.33 In Qin and Han China, in contrast, the ruler did not display himself in public. Power was generated not through the public adulation of the people, but through a policy of sequestration and hiding away. Sealed up behind layer after layer of walls, the emperor rewarded only his closest followers with the supreme honor of letting them come into his presence. This power of the inside over the outside, and of the hidden over the visible, became a longstanding principle of the spatial construction of power in imperial China.34
A related difference was that the Roman emperor, as discussed by Fergus Millar, would often provide gifts to humble people with whom he came into contact in the course of his duties, just as he could receive petitions from such people and adjudicate cases on their behalf.35 Again, such contact for the Chinese ruler would have taken place only with his own officials and hence, as noted above, they—and the chieftains of surrendered barbarians who were ceremonially allowed into the imperial presence—were the only people who would have received gifts from the emperor as a consequence of coming into his presence. The Han emperor’s gifts, like his decrees and punishments, were distributed outward solely through the agency of his servants.
A fourth, and final, distinction between the Roman and Chinese cases is the distinctive preimperial history of gift giving as a mode of elite action. As the layout of Veyne’s book demonstrates, imperial euergetism was established on the basis of centuries in which public charity and private patronage had together served to generate and define elite status. Leaders in Greek cities, Hellenistic monarchs, and the Roman senate and order of equites had all in various forms contributed to public liturgies, made conspicuous gifts to the urban populace, or gathered networks of clients. The forms of beneficence practiced by the Roman emperor were in many ways extensions or elaborations of existing models, so that Augustus could map out many elements of the radically new imperial role through adopting established forms by which leading political figures had distinguished themselves.
The converse of this, as Egon Flaig has demonstrated, was that the emperor was both inextricably enmeshed in a society defined by patterns of beneficia and gratia but at the same time of necessity beyond claims of reciprocity. This was to a degree theorized by Seneca, who posited a society constituted through gift and obligation but asserted the new monarchy as an innovation in which a single, superior giver “inundated all groups and persons in the empire with beneficia to such a degree that they were all in gratia, obligated to gratitude to him.” Given the emperor’s unique contribution to a new world order, loyalty and service to him were absolute duties that could not command any reciprocal obligations on his part. Gifts flowed in both directions, notably the bequests to the emperor in wills, but the obligations entailed in such gifts moved in one direction only.36
To the extent that is not a product of the biases of our sources, the evidence for the Chinese case suggests a model of imperial generosity that evolved not from any prior form of euergetism or any elite self–constitution through conspicuous giving, but rather from the mode of state formation in the Warring States period. The rulers of these emerging states, who provided the pattern for the later imperial role, distinguished themselves from their rivals through the steady incorporation of ever greater numbers of peasants into military service and their structures of taxation. The quid pro quo for such service, as theorized in the political manuals of the period and practiced by the states, was the granting of titles and land.37 The primary gifts of the Han emperors—titles, land, tax relief, or monetary presentations in times of crisis—were the later forms of the earlier Warring States’ awards to the peasantry.
To the extent that there was an ideological pattern for such beneficence, it was conventional to claim as a model not any earlier form of public service or giving by a noble elite, but rather the action of a beneficent Heaven that freely bestowed life on all beneath it, without requiring any service in return. (Certain similar themes appear in early imperial Roman literature, where accounts of the Golden Age in which nature freely yielded up her wealth without the necessity of human labor were invoked as a precedent for the new imperial order.38) As a matter of policy, the Han emperor’s gifts were also part of a larger aim of preserving a small–holding, free peasantry that was the foundation of the state. This contrast in the origins of standard imperial gifts in the two systems once again draws our attention back to the urban bias of the Roman case and the rural focus of the Chinese.39
“Gift,” as many scholars have noted, is not always an analytically useful term. It is necessary to distinguish various types of gift circulation or charity, because the types of goods that are conventionally given and the roles that are defined in their giving and receiving will mark the difference between two cultures. Thus, as noted above, Veyne emphasizes the contrast between Christian charity, which would become the standard model of giving in late antiquity, and classic euergetism. The latter is defined as gifts to a public realm that would be potentially received by all members of that realm. Indeed, the collective gifts of the elite to the common good are in some sense constitutive of the public realm, as a cluster of constructed spaces that would not otherwise exist, as a set of distinctive virtues (“public spirit”), and as a series of personal relationships defined on the model of patron and client. In this way we can see how in the ancient Mediterranean world particular modes of distributing wealth, distinct from market transactions, defined first the city–state and later the empire as distinctive public forms, and how these would be replaced by yet another form in the Christianized world.
In the Han Chinese case the public realm was not clearly distinguished from the political, so that participation in a res publica meant to be in the service of the ruler. (The same sort of pun/homophone gloss by which Cicero defined the “republic” could also be done in Chinese, where what was “public” [gong] was what pertained to the “lord” [gong].) Thus, it was above all the gift of titles by which the ruler brought all free men into his service and granted them corresponding legal privileges that constituted a broader “public” space. The other associated gifts, as noted above, were primarily extensions of policies aimed at preserving this political space defined by the participation of a free–holding peasantry.
The clear emergence of a realm in which local rural order was defined and maintained through the conspicuous charity and public–spirited actions of powerful families was to a certain degree the reflection of the breakdown of the earlier “imperial” model. This breakdown was marked by the parallel abandonment of universal military service and of all attempts to restrict the concentration of land ownership at the beginning of the Eastern Han and followed shortly by the eclipse of the old system of public ranking through the emperor’s gift of titles. This shift from the imperial realm defined by the emperor’s bestowal of ranks to one based on flow of gifts through circles of local charity indicated the replacement of a military–bureaucratic model of the state by a state–family union, in which the state order was transmitted and preserved through powerful local families. This shift toward a semipublic realm defined by an uneasy joining of a reduced political state with an extended kin and village hybrid defined the shift from the early imperial (Qin–Han) era to the centuries of the Northern and Southern Dynasties.