The history of the Han empire is at once familiar and strange. It is familiar because we actually do know a fair amount about what happened. Most histories of the Han are a rehearsal of essentially the same sequence of events—the legendary battle between Liu Bang and Xiang Yu, imperial consolidation of Emperor Wu, rise of a Confucian elite, the interregnum of Wang Mang, and so forth—all of which are documented in well-preserved contemporary records. It is also strange, however, because we actually understand so little of it. Bearing the burden of being the grand beginning of imperial China, the Han has long had a historiography shot through with nationalist foundational myths, of one variety or another, that are less concerned with how the Han historically came to be than how it participated in the invention of China in hindsight. This is a type of historiography that is less interested in why a certain event happened, than in the simple fact that it did happen; narratives of Han history are therefore often mere chronological collections of events, intended mainly for historical identification rather than historical understanding.

Luke Habberstad's engaging new book Forming the Early Chinese Court is a very welcome departure from this predominant yet problematic paradigm in the study of the Han. The topic of the study is the “early Chinese court.” The period concerned is the Han empire (207 BCE–220 CE), specifically the late Western Han (circa first century BCE). The word “Forming” in the title is key to the approach of this study. Habberstad is interested in how the court was formed in early China. He does not describe the early Chinese court as a fully formed thing, either historically realized or culturally determined. Instead, he focuses on the historical formation of the court as an outcome of the debates and negotiations between various power holders of the empire with different, sometimes competing, ethical and political leanings (or what the author calls their “normative understanding” of the world) from one moment to the next (10). In other words, Habberstad approaches the “court” not as a thing (or more precisely, a Weberian ideal-type) but as a complex set of evolving relations. The result is an adventurous account of the history of the Han that brings to light heretofore little-noted conversations, contention, and anxiety that were very much constitutive of the history of the Han empire.

This story of the “forming” of the early Chinese court unfolds over five chapters, divided into three parts and bookended by an Introduction and a Conclusion. In the Introduction, Habberstad explains his capacious, nimble definition of the “court”; for him the term refers to a “physical space,” a “social or institutional entity,” and the “rituals, etiquette, and refined conduct that constituted properly courtly behavior” (13). Corresponding roughly to the Chinese terms chao or chaoting, this idea of the court “indicated practically everything: all the rituals, spaces, institutions, and people that composed the court and, by extension, the empire” (14). Moreover, Habberstad insists, rightly in my mind, that this idea of the “court” underwent significant transformation in the early imperial period. This study is therefore an attempt “to trace that highly significant semantic shift and follow the huge amount of cultural work that took place in order to imbue ‘the court’ with so many layers of meaning” over the course of the Han (14). To do that, he explains that this study will take a literary approach, with “rhetoric and representation at the center of its analysis,” focusing on “the emergence of different categories and ways of talking and writing about the court” (p. 15). The methodological assumption here seems to be that the court subsists primarily on words, and therefore a study of its transformation can and should be done through an examination of the evolution of utterances.

Then off we go with Part One of the book, entitled “Rituals,” devoted to the debates at court on sumptuary and ceremonial regulations. Dwelling mostly on events of the late Western Han, the analysis relies heavily on the Shiji and the Hanshu. Habberstad has not only mined these two texts for historical data, he has read them as rhetorical works that participated in the transformation of the court from the mid-Western Han to the early Eastern Han. It is something of a high-wire act, reading these two texts as both historical archive and ideological rhetoric. If Ban Gu had such a serious classicist axe to grind, for instance, how do we work through the ideological refractions in the Hanshu to arrive at a reliable account of what in fact happened during the Han? It may have been helpful to have a more explicit explanation of the author's hermeneutical stance on these Han texts, rather than perceiving that stance only as it is embodied in the arguments themselves. In these two opening chapters, with a detailed discussion of the debates over salary ranks, orders of honors, sumptuary regulations, and ceremonial rules (occasioned, in particular, by the unexpected arrival of a Xiongnu shanyu at court in the year 51 BCE), Habberstad argues convincingly that the definition of the court was never simply a matter of “assertions of imperial power,” but rather was a collective process, involving diverse Han officials who “did not just assume the status of the imperial court as an unambiguous center, but actively participated in crafting a center” according to their own “ambitions and experiences, be they intellectual, political, or social” (83–84). Out of this chorus of voices, Habberstad notes that there was a “growing vogue for classicist ideals in the late Western Han” (82). At the same time, he is at pains to emphasize that this was not just a matter of “‘ideological’ changes or interpretive shifts alone” but a part of a broader trend, overdetermined and driven by a whole host of institutional and social developments, including the imperial expansion and demographic transformation of the nobility under Emperor Wu (r. 141–87 BCE) (82).

Part Two, “Spaces,” has only one chapter, entitled “Parks, Palaces, and Prestige.” It tells the story of how, in the last century of the Western Han, officials articulated a “complicated rhetorical landscape” where they “wrestled with the benefits and problems of parks and palaces” (89). Specifically, a new notion emerged in this period that the Weiyang palace was the “only true and legitimate center of imperial power,” while all other architectural structures that lay outside, including the Shanglin Park, were illegitimate or at best secondary spaces of the court (89). Once again, Habberstad notes the “classicist turn toward frugality” as a possible contributing factor behind this development, but at the same time, he is quick to point out the crucial role played by other factors, such as the “increasingly wealthy elite court society” who began to see the Weiyang Palace, and Chang'an more broadly, as the privileged center of the empire's social and cultural world (92).

The two chapters of Part Three, “Roles,” deal with the history of the Han bureaucracy. The first, titled “Politics, Rank, and Duty in Institutional Change,” takes aim at the popular idea that the Western Han saw the growth of an “inner court” that was in contention with an “outer court.” Focusing on the bureaucratic reform under Emperor Cheng (r. 33–7 BCE) in and around 8 BCE, Habberstad shows that it was not about this supposed conflict between the “inner” and “outer” courts at all. Instead, the late Western Han bureaucratic reform was driven by a complex “convergence of interests” among a multitude of political actors, including the emperor, eminent officials, and the Wang family members, with their “differing objectives and experiences” (137–38). The final chapter of the book (before the Conclusion), entitled “The Literary Invention of Bureaucracy,” delves deeply into the notion of “discrete duties” (fen zhi), an important element in the 8 BCE reform, in the conception of government offices. Drawing on official biographies and tables in the Shiji and the Hanshu, as well as the poetic text Admonitions of the Many Offices (Bai guan zhen), the author tracks the emergence of the notion of government posts and offices as entirely impersonal entities, defined by fixed duties and responsibilities in a structured hierarchy, between the Western Han and the Eastern Han. This “invention of bureaucracy” may have been influenced by the classist turn in the late Western Han, but it was in fact a much more widespread phenomenon, rooted in new understanding of the nature of the Han empire and the “new modes of literary production and representation” that its power holders chose for its articulation (167). The book's Conclusion provides a summary of its key findings.

Methodologically, this new study reminds me of another recent work in the field of early China: Michael D.K. Ing's The Vulnerability of Integrity in Early Confucian Thought (Oxford, 2017). Both works refuse to reduce their objects of inquiry—the Han court and early Confucian thought—into a set of theoretical constructs, ideological dogmas, or essentialist descriptions. Instead, they opt to see them as historical formations, always in the process of becoming, through lively debates and disputations between individuals trying to make sense of the world in which they have found themselves. This is a very welcome and much needed development in the field of early China studies, in my estimation; moving decidedly away from cultural determinism (or one may say, subtly Orientalizing depictions) at long last, we begin to see a much more historical, humanistic understanding of early China in these new works. Along with other exciting new publications on the early imperial periods by Charles Sanft, Tamara Chin, and Liang Cai, among others, it appears that we are now in the midst of an exciting reconsideration of the political culture of the early empires, especially the Han dynasty.

As I turned the last page of this new book, I did wish that Habberstad had said more about the broader implications of his arguments about the early Chinese court. This is less a complaint than a testament to the great interest that his arguments have generated for me. For instance, it is obvious that there was an implicit dialogue going on with Herlee G. Creel, and by extension the entire body of scholarship on early Chinese bureaucracy inspired by Max Weber's notion of “rationality” and “rationalization.” As the author himself notes at one point in the Introduction, this story of the early Chinese court takes us beyond the notion of “bureaucratic creep in a classic Weberian sense” (10). The last chapter of the book makes clear that the bureaucracy of the Han was “invented” out of a convergence of political calculus and literary engagement, not the result of rationalization of a once magical but increasingly disenchanted worldview in early China, as Max Weber argued more than a century ago. It would have been instructive to hear more explicitly Habberstad's assessment of—or confrontation with—this old paradigm. I am also curious to hear what this startlingly new picture of the Han empire may mean for comparative studies of the old empires of the ancient world. How would we now situate early imperial China in world history, if the old measure of rational bureaucratization is rendered hollow in favor of a history of political particulars? I eagerly look forward to seeing how Habberstad may flesh out these various implications of this greatly adventurous book in his future publications.