1. State Engagement in the Handicraft Sector

Abstract

Textual and material evidence shows that since the Shang dynasty (ca. sixteenth to eleventh century B.C.), workshops for manufacturing and construction existed. They provided weapons and objects for ceremonial and everyday use for the court and the ruling elite and planned and executed great central building projects like palaces, city walls, and funerary monuments. A great number of bronze vessels were produced for the ceremonial use of the rulers. Archeologists have calculated that it would have taken 18 years ‒ if 10,000 earth pounders were engaged for 330 days per year ‒ to complete the stamped-earth city walls of an early Shang city located in the vicinity of modern Zhengzhou in Henan.1 Both cases suggest that the work organization lay in the hands of specialized groups who could command great and, in the case of the bronze casters, highly skilled manpower. These workers and artisans most probably stood in the immediate service of the rulers and were supervised by their off icials.2 Production and construction for the service of the state have been incorporated in various ways into the institutional frameworks of the ruling dynasties from that time onward. Between the third century B.C. and the tenth century A.D., government and civilian crafts and industries co-existed, and more state activist and more laissez-faire periods alternated in the longer dynasties of the Han and Tang. The short precursor dynasties Qin and Sui maintained a high degree of state activism, which was one of the reasons for their premature end. The labour force especially for building, but also in the workshops, often had to serve the state in corvée obligations or in slavery, but the level of unfree labour apparently diminished after having reached its apex in the Northern and Southern Dynasties and the Sui. In 494 A.D., permanent work obligations were f irst reported to have been replaced by work shifts from the Liu-Song of the Southern Dynasties.3 The shift system was used time and again in subsequent dynasties until the f irst years of the Qing. A