A History of the World in 100 Objects - Dr Neil MacGregor [89]
The Han Chinese and the Roman empires covered roughly the same amount of land, but China was more populous. A census conducted in China only two years before the cup was made came up with the wonderfully precise figure of a population of 57,671,400 individuals. Roel Sterckx says:
One of the things we need to keep in mind is that the Chinese Empire is immense and that it straddles a hugely diverse geographic region. In the case of the Han we’re talking about a distance that stretches from North Korea to Vietnam. Contact between people is not always very obvious, so the circulation of goods, the circulation of imperially sanctioned objects, together with texts, is part of that symbolical assertion of what it means to be an empire. You might not see people who are part of the same empire, but you might actually, by witnessing the goods that are produced across the empire, feel or have a sense of belonging to that greater imagined community in many ways.
Fostering that sense of an imagined community was a key imperial strategy – and it didn’t come cheap. Typically, the emperor paid out a large chunk of state revenue each year to provide allies and vassal states with luxury gifts, including thousands of rolls of silk and hundreds of lacquer cups. So our cup is part of a system – it was given either as an imperial gift, or in lieu of a salary, to a senior official at the Han military garrisons near present-day Pyongyang in North Korea. Apart from its sheer monetary value, it was intended to bestow prestige and to suggest a personal link between the commander and the emperor.
At this point in the Han Dynasty’s history, however, the affairs of state were not in the hands of the emperor but of the dowager empress, the formidable Grand Empress Dowager Wang, who effectively ran the state for thirty years, as none of the emperors had much time or aptitude for business. She had one emperor son, who spent a good deal of time with his concubine, Flying Swallow (who, it was said, was so light that she could dance on the palm of his hand); one emperor grandson, who was besotted with his male lover; and another grandson, on the throne at the time of our cup, who had acceded at the age of 9 and was to be poisoned with pepper wine at the age of 15, two years after our cup was made. So this lacquer cup lived in interesting times, and its making was almost certainly organized by the Grand Dowager Empress.
The machinery of the state, including the production of luxury goods, was so well structured that it could work perfectly well despite such foibles at the top. This cup is remarkable for the supreme craftsmanship of its making, and even more so because it was subjected to a level of quality control that far exceeds that of most designer luxury objects today.
Chinese characters around the base of the cup tell us who was involved in its manufacture
Around the oval base of the cup runs a thin band with sixty-seven Chinese characters on it. In Europe you might expect this kind of band to be a motto or a dedication, perhaps, but here the characters list six craftsmen responsible for the different processes involved in manufacturing the cup – making the wooden core, undercoat lacquering, top-coat lacquering, gilding the ear-handles, painting and final polishing. And then – this could surely happen only in China – it goes on to list the seven product inspectors, whose responsibility was to guarantee quality. Six craftsmen, and seven supervisors – this is the stuff of real bureaucracy. The list reads:
The wooden core by Yi, lacquering by Li, top-coat lacquering by Dang, gilding of the ear-handles by Gu, painting by Ding, final polishing by Feng, product inspection by Ping, supervisor-foreman Zong. In charge were Government Head Supervisor Zhang, Chief Administrator