An Elevated Absolutist Court
Many of the policies of Emperor Wu were a belated resumption of those of Qin. He abandoned the early Han practice of paying tribute to the Xiongnu, and of giving them princesses in marriage.
Instead he resumed the Qin reliance on military campaigns and attempts to settle Chinese population in the frontier regions. Claiming a semi-divine status, he again carried out the fengand shan sacrifices, and made many reforms in the imperial cult to assert the character of the emperor as both a high priest and cosmic figure. In addition, he further expanded court ritual and founded or revived a Music Bureau to provide more elaborate performances to accompany his banquets and rituals. To fund his military campaigns and the expenses of his enlarged court, he revived the Qin monopolies of salt and iron, and placed heavy new taxes on merchant capital, confiscating the property of those who did not report their wealth in full and securing accurate knowledge of this wealth by offering shares of the confiscated property to informers. He also dispatched special officials to investigate the activities of powerful and wealthy local families, and to find legal pretexts to destroy them and confiscate their wealth. At his behest the Confucian scholar Dong Zhongshu revived and expanded the Five Phases theory that made the emperor a cosmic figure and the power of the dynasty an expression of the fundamental forces of nature. Thus in his reign the office of emperor re-emerged in its full splendor as high priest, divine being who linked Heaven and Earth, and source of all authority and privilege.[593]This lofty status of the emperor was articulated in many political institutions and ritual practices. First, he was the source of all law. The legal code of the empire was defined as the laws proclaimed by the dynastic founder, the word of any future emperor enjoyed the status of a statute, and no government action without the emperor's seal had the force of law.
The only formal restraint on his law-making powers was that changes in the law implied a criticism of his ancestors and hence were morally questionable as unfilial. Executions needed the emperor's approval, and he could command the summary beheading of anyone he chose. He was also the chief administrator; all court offices and the major local offices were in his gift. While for the most important decisions the full court was assembled to discuss the issues, the emperor enjoyed the final word. He was also the largest landowner in the empire, with extensive parks and estates, and in law the income of all non-cultivated terrain, e.g., forests, mines, and salt pits, belonged to the emperor. During much of the Han period the emperor's personal revenue from his lands and the non-cultivated areas of the empire exceeded the total public tax revenue.These extraordinary legal, administrative, and economic powers were underwritten by a series of sumptuary laws that sanctified the person of the emperor. The patterns, styles, and ornaments of his court costume were forbidden to any other person. The gates and major roads of the capital had a special lane that was reserved for the emperor's use, and when he went out he was preceded by heralds who cleared the way so that no one could gaze on him. Any object bestowed on one of his subjects by the emperor was sacred, and to damage it was punishable by death. Thus one set of bamboo strips discovered in a tomb records the case of an official who struck an old man carrying a “dove staff” of the sort bestowed by the emperor on all people who reached the age of 70. Because the staff, a gift from the emperor, was dropped and broken, the official was executed.[594]
The prestige of emperors was also displayed in their burials under mounds that gradually formed an artificial “mountain chain” defining the landscape to the north of the Han capital. Each tumulus where an emperor was buried was accompanied by wooden buildings for the performance of rituals, and these were maintained by the populations of artificial towns created for the upkeep of the imperial tombs.
The Han founder had populated the town attached to his tomb with the leading families of the empire, who were forcibly resettled in the capital region in imitation of a Qin policy employed to reduce any resistance in the provinces. This practice was continued by Emperor Wu and the later Emperor Xuan (r. 74-49 bce). These towns grew to have populations of 200,000-300,000 and according to a census of 2 ce more people lived in the tomb towns of the Emperors Wu and Xuan than within the walls of Chang'an. Many leading officials and scholars of the Han dynasty came from these towns or lived there while serving at the court. Thus the maintenance of the imperial ancestral cult also served the purpose of drawing population and wealth into the capital, weakening localities, and creating a large population for recruitment in the immediate vicinity of the capital.As suggested here, the prestige of the emperors was displayed not merely in their burials under artificial mountains at the capital, and in the resettlement of the elite around these tombs, but in the structure of the capital itself. With its massive walls, its regulated street grid, its equally regulated market grids, and its great palace complexes, the entire capital constituted a display of the emperor's grandeur. A couple of recent papers have traced out how this logic of generating political power through the visible display of urban structures and public spaces linked the Western Han capital with early imperial Rome, despite the conspicuous visual differences of the two cities.[595]
Few rulers after Emperor Wu were so ambitious or assertive in their powers and privileges, and in the second century of the Western Han (first century bce) there was an abandonment of aggressive foreign policy, a general reduction in the scale of the imperial ancestral cult and in the size of imperial estates, and a cutback in the lavishness of the court. However, the same period witnessed the establishment of the cult of Heaven, in which the emperor was recognized as the unique conduit between the human world and the divine realm, the general acceptance of the Five Phase cycle theory, in which the existence of the dynasty became the expression of natural law, and the emergence of a “classicist turn,” marked by a new focus on collecting and collating earlier works at the imperial library.[596] While the emperors of this period were less active than Emperor Wu, the emperor's role as the center of the human world and the source of power became generally recognized both in ritual practice and in political theory. By the Eastern Han (25-220 ce), the position of the emperor as the link between Heaven and Earth, the source of all political authority, and the center of the polity was almost universally recognized.