570 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1938 



Shih Huang- ti's dynasty, the Ch'in * (or Ts'in, as the name is some- 

 times spelled in English), fell a very few years after his death. There 

 ensued a brief period of civil war and general turmoil. Out of this 

 there emerged as victor a low-born but nevertheless very able adven- 

 turer who thereupon founded the Former or Western Han Dynasty 

 (206 B. C.-A. D. 7). 5 This was the man usually known in later 

 history as Han Kao-tzu. (his posthumous title) ; he played a part com- 

 parable to that of Octavius not quite two centures later in putting an 

 end to a period of civil strife and setting up a stable government. He 

 at first thought of fixing the capital of his newly won dominions a 

 short distance south of the YellowRiver, in what is today the province 

 of Honan. Ultimately, however, he established his permanent official 

 residence some 200 miles farther to the west, in central Shensi province. 

 The city which he thus founded soon became one of the greatest of 

 its day, anywhere in the world. Ch'ang-an during the period of its 

 prosperity may have been rivalled in population and perhaps in extent 

 by certain cities of the Near East and of northern India; but Europe 

 certainly had nothing as yet even remotely comparable to it. 



Then as always, however, Chinese architecture was essentially one 

 of wood and terre pise. Hence the ancient capital of the Hans has left 

 us, above ground at least, but few remains of itself. Of these the most 

 notable are portions of its great rampart of solidly tamped earth, and 

 what is said to have been the foundation-mound of the principal build- 

 ing in the imperial palace-enclosure — the celebrated Wei Yang Kung, 

 of whose almost fabulous splendor and magnificence many tales are 

 told. 



The site of the ancient city lies 4 or 5 miles northwest of Hsi-an Fu 

 (sometimes spelled "Sianfu" in English), the capital of the province 

 of Shensi, and a little south of the historic Wei, a western affluent of 

 the Yellow River. The country hereabout is an intensively cultivated 

 alluvial plain which rises into hills some distance to the south. 



The morning was misty, the visibility poor; but as we approached 

 the site we began to see ahead of us a lofty and now shapeless mound, 

 obviously artificial in origin. This stood, we found, at the south- 

 eastern corner of the ancient city. Closer examination showed that it 

 was composed of successive layers of terre pis6, rammed very hard 

 and averaging about 4 inches in thickness. 6 



4 From this word almost certainly came our name "China" Those who deny this (usually on the ground 

 that the name "China" antedates the founding of the Ch'in empire) forget that the state of Ch'in was estab- 

 lished several centuries earlier, andlong before Shih Huang-ti's time had already annexed the eastern termini 

 of both the great land-routes linking the Far East with the Occident, the one by way of Central Asia, the 

 other through Farther India. 



» The Han Dynasty, it should be remarked, was the first Chinese ruling house to spring from the ranks 

 of the common people. The founders of all the earlier ones had belonged to the turbulent, hard-drinking, 

 chariot-fighting feudal nobility, the possessors of the Chinese Bronze Age civilization (in regard to the latter 

 point cf. Antiquity, vol. 7, p. 404, December 1933). 



• Recent excavations at the two opposite ends of the Asiatic continent have shown that the use of terre 

 pis6 construction dates back, in China at least to the second millenium B. O. and in the Near East con- 

 siderably earlier still. 



