Han & Xin
Daily Life
Food, homes & daily routines
The First Book a Han Child Memorised: Names, Clothes and Kitchen Pots
A word-list begins not with a story but with a run of personal names, and then, at 'the names are done; now speak of things', with clothes, grain and pots. Country children fought over it; gentry sons called it vulgar.
A Doctor and a Poet Each Wrote Down an Epidemic
One was a physician counting his own family's dead. The other was a poet describing a city of coffins. They wrote of two different epidemics, more than ten years apart, and neither text is a statistic.
Drawing Water and Stepping to the Loom: Two Ways Han Women Were Written Down
One text is a mother's advice to her daughters; the other is an honour roll. Neither is a record of daily life, yet both keep returning to the same work: spinning, fetching water, cooking, serving the old.
Seven Pieces of Silk, Forty-Nine Grams: Cutting a Han Robe
Two gauze robes from Mawangdui weigh 49 and 48 grams; one is cut from seven pieces of cloth. Their weave can be measured, and the Han cap-and-ribbon regulations show how cloth was counted into rank. No price, no hours.
Three Shi, Three Dou, Three Sheng: A Ration Register from the Han Frontier
One 4.66-gram wooden slip from a Han frontier post records fifteen men, their grain ration of three shi three dou three sheng, and the month each collected it himself.