Confucian High Culture

A fourth major change that was crucial to the later history of the East Asian empires was the triumph of the principle that the purpose of the state was to preserve order through the patronage of the arts and disciplines that were understood to underpin a truly human society, as opposed to the animal savagery that had been the orig­inal condition of the human race.^[599] Under the Warring States the polity had been an engine of war, and the basic maxim that guided policies and justified royal au­thority was “enrich the state and make the army strong.” With the end of the world of competing states, neither imposing financial levies nor wielding military power retained their old justifications, and the role of the state consequently became un­defined and open to challenge.

For Emperor Wu this recognition of these Zhou dynasty writings as a textual canon was only one aspect of a multifaceted vision of imperial grandeur. Moreover, the contents of the texts were not used as a state ideology, and the scholars who mastered them were primarily employed to provide a distinctive, lofty style to im­perial decrees. However, as the aggressive military campaigns and splendid ritual displays that had characterized his reign were abandoned by later rulers, this textual canon, the imperial academy where men studied that canon, and the devotion of the state and its agents to the defense and extension of China's cultural patrimony became increasingly central to formal accounts of the imperial project. By the end of the Western Han there were more than 30,000 students at the academy, and it had become a major route to court office, although still not the most important one. The canon was even more honored under Wang Mang (r. 9-23 ce), who is best remembered as a usurper of the throne, but who claimed to rule as a Confucian sage and finally institutionalized the sacrifices to Heaven at the capital as the defin­itive state cult. Under the Eastern Han, Confucianism and its associated texts came to offer guiding principles for government policies, and also served to justify the power of the elite families who dominated local society.