A newly recruited Han court official named Jia Juanzhi submitted this memorial in response to a native revolt on the island of Hainan, which the Han empire had colonized in 110 BCE and administered as Zhuya (or Zhuyai, an older pronunciation) commandery. This revolt had broken out in 48 BCE, the year of Emperor Yuan’s (r. 48-33 BCE) accession to the throne, and was the third since 59 BCE. Emperor Yuan was contemplating deploying more troops to Hainan, but Jia’s memorial convinced him to abandon the island instead and focus on relieving the victims of a major famine in Guandong (“east of the passes”), a region corresponding to the North China Plain.

Jia Juanzhi’s arguments are notable for their deft use of recent history, classical allusions, and ethnocentric prejudice to criticize imperial expansion and assert that the lives of Chinese people were worth more than the barbarians and exotic products of Hainan. This was probably the reason for Ban Gu’s decision to give Jia Juanzhi a biography in the Hanshu (see source 2.8), which includes the full text of the memorial, despite Jia’s political insignificance. Ban Gu was himself opposed to expansionist warfare when writing the Hanshu, and would have seen the memorial as an ideal template for anti-expansionist rhetoric.

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I, your subject, have heard that Yao and Shun were the greatest sages and that Yu entered the realm of sageliness without surpassing them. Therefore, Confucius praised Yao as “great indeed,” the Shao dance of Shun’s court as “perfectly good,” and Yu as “without a flaw.”¹ Such was the moral authority of these three sage-kings, yet their lands spanned not more than several thousand li, extending to the Flowing Sands in the west and reaching the sea in the east. Their reputation and civilizing influence spread to the far north and the far south and to the four seas beyond.² They ruled over all who wished to partake in their civilizing influence but did not forcibly rule over those who did not wish to partake in it.

As a result, rulers and subjects alike had moral authority worthy of songs of praise, and everything formed from qi was in its proper place. Wuding and King Cheng were great, humane rulers of the Shang and Zhou, yet their lands did not extend beyond Jiang and Huang in the east, the Dī and Qiang peoples in the west, the Man barbarians of Jing (Chu) in the south, and Shuofang (Ordos) in the north. Thus, praise arose everywhere, and all who saw and heard these things rejoiced at being alive; the Yuechang people presented tribute, speaking a language so foreign that it went through nine stages of indirect translation.³ This is not something that could be achieved through military means….

In the time of the Qin dynasty, the First Emperor mobilized his armies and attacked distant lands, coveting the frontier and emptying the heartland, intent on enlarging his territory and not considering the dangers of doing so. But his lands did not extend beyond Min-Yue in the south or Taiyuan in the north before the empire collapsed from internal revolts. The disaster finally came at the end of the Second Emperor’s reign, and to this day, people have not forgotten the Song of the Great Wall.⁴

Fortunately, when the sagely Han dynasty arose, it prayed for the lives of the common people to be preserved and restored order to the subcelestial realm. Emperor Wen, having compassion for the still-unsettled condition of the Central Lands, ceased military activities and promoted civil administration. There were only several hundred criminal cases a year, taxes were lowered to the rate of forty coins a year, and adult men did corvée labor only once every three years.⁵ At that time, a horse that could run without stopping for a thousand li was presented as tribute, but Emperor Wen issued an edict saying: “The phoenix banners go before me and the linked carriages of my retinue follow after; in fine weather, I can travel fifty li in a day, and in bad weather only thirty li. If I were to ride a thousand-li horse, where would I go on my own?” So he returned the horse, paid for the travel expenses, and issued an edict saying: “I will not accept any tribute. Order the various regions not to seek to come with tribute.”⁶ …

By the sixth year of the Yuanshou era (117 BCE) in Emperor Wu’s reign, the millet stored in the Great Granary had turned red, rotted, and become inedible, and the strings of the coins in the capital had also rotted and made these coins impossible to count.⁷ Then [Emperor Wu decided to] settle the score of the incident at Pingcheng⁸ and enumerate the many occasions when the Xiongnu had raided our border since the time of [their great ruler] Modun (r. 209-174 BCE). He raised his armies and spurred his war horses, banking on a wealthy population to repel and subdue the Xiongnu. To the west, he built alliances with various countries up to Anxi (the Parthian empire); to the east, he crossed over the Boundary Stone to establish commanderies in Xuantu and Lelang.⁹ To the north he drove the Xiongnu back ten thousand li and then built camps and forts; he also established control over the coast of the southern sea and set up eight commanderies there.

Then the annual total of criminal cases was in the tens of thousands, taxes were raised to several hundred coins a year, and though state monopolies were imposed on salt, iron, and liquor in order to support expenditure, this was still not sufficient. From that time on, bandits arose everywhere, and military expeditions were launched time and again. Fathers died in battle, followed by their sons being wounded in combat. Thus women were forced to guard frontier forts, orphans were left wailing in the streets, and old mothers and widows could be seen weeping in alleys, their tears streaming down into their mouths; they made offerings to far-off tombs, longing for spirits that were ten thousand li away. The King of Huainan illegally wrote a tiger tally and secretly hired famed warriors, and Gongsun Yong of Guandong falsely claimed to be an envoy.¹⁰ These were all a result of excessive territorial expansion and unending military expeditions.

Now, Guandong is the only part of the subcelestial realm that matters, and the only great regions of Guandong are Qi and Chu.¹¹ Yet for a long time the people of these regions have been impoverished, wandering from year to year as refugees, leaving their walled cities and dying in heaps on the roads.¹² No human affection is closer than that between parents and their children, and none gives greater pleasure than that between husband and wife. But now husbands are forced to give their wives to other men [in exchange for food] and families are forced to sell their children. Even the law is unable to prevent it, and even moral duty cannot stop it. This is a matter of great worry for the country. Now Your Majesty, not restraining the impetuosity that comes from rage, intends to rush armies to the south and throw them into the middle of the great sea, seeking satisfaction in a distant and desolate land. This is not the way to rescue the starving victims of famine and preserve the lives of the people.

The Odes says, “These stupid and ignorant Man of Jing/Set themselves against our great state.”¹³ By this it means that when a sage arises, [the Man of Jing] are the last to submit, and when the Central Lands are in decline, they are the first to rebel.¹⁴ They have frequently brought disaster to the state; they have plagued us since antiquity. How much more so, when it comes to Man barbarians ten thousand li to the south! Among the Luo-Yue (Lạc Việt) peoples, fathers and sons bathe in the same river, and they have the practice of drinking through their noses.¹⁵ They are no different from animals, and it was never worthwhile to establish commanderies and counties over them. In ignorance and isolation, they live in the middle of the sea, surrounded by mist and dew and humid qi; there poisonous plants, insects, and snakes abound on land and in the water. There, soldiers die [of disease] without having ever seen the enemy. Besides, it is not only Zhuya commandery that has pearls, rhinoceros horns, and tortoiseshell. Abandoning it would be no source of regret; not attacking the rebels would bring no loss to our might and prestige. Its people are like fish and soft-shelled turtles. Why covet their allegiance? …

I, your subject, foolishly suggest that we should have nothing to do with any lands whose people do not wear robes and caps¹⁶, whose lands are excluded from the “Yugong” (Tribute of Yu)¹⁷, and whose histories are not recorded in the Annals. Let Your Majesty quickly abandon Zhuya and worry only about relieving the suffering of Guandong.

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1. These quotes are from chapters 3 and 8 of the Analects. ↩︎
2. This quotes the description of Yu’s realm in the “Yugong”(Tribute of Yu) chapter of the Documents (Shangshu). See source 2.2. ↩︎
3. According to the Great Commentary to the Documents (Shangshu dazhuan), the Yuechang lived to the south of Jiaozhi (north Vietnam) and presented a white pheasant as tribute to the Zhou dynasty during the regency of the Duke of Zhou, in response to the Duke’s success in bringing peace and prosperity to the Zhou realm. The Great Commentary was composed in the second century BCE and is attributed to Fu Sheng (268-178 BCE), a Confucian scholar credited with preserving the only copy of the Documents to survive the burning of classical texts by the Qin empire. ↩︎
4. This song has not been preserved but presumably speaks of the hardships suffered by commoners drafted to build the Qin Great Wall. Min-Yue corresponds to Fujian province, and Taiyuan to modern Taiyuan city in Shanxi. ↩︎
5. The previous rate was 120 coins a year and corvée labor once a year. ↩︎
6. This incident is not recorded in the Shiji and Hanshu annals of Emperor Wen’s reign, but the latter does state that in the first year of his reign, he “ordered the commanderies and kingdoms not to send tribute.” ↩︎
7. These images are borrowed from chapter 30 of the Shiji, a treatise on taxation and fiscal policy in the Han. ↩︎
8. In 200 BCE, the Han dynasty’s founder Liu Bang (Gaozu) was besieged by Xiongnu forces in Baideng (Pingcheng) for seven days. He escaped by sending emissaries to bribe the wife of the Xiongnu leader Modun, and later established the policy of “peace and kinship” with the Xiongnu. ↩︎
9. There were two Boundary Stones (jieshi) in the Han period: one was a rock off the Bohai Gulf coast, near modern Qinhuangdao on the eastern end of Hebei, and the other was on a mountain at the eastern end of the Qin-Han Great Wall, near Anju in North Korea. The former seems more likely to be referenced in this context, since Xuantu commandery was located to the northwest of the Anju Boundary Stone and not to its east. ↩︎
10. According to the accounts of the rebellion of Liu An, the King of Huainan (see source 1.7), in the Shiji and Hanshu, he forged copies of the imperial seal and the seals of various officials from the Chancellor down to the prefects and commandants of areas near Huainan. But there is no mention of him forging an imperial tiger tally. An account of Gongsun Yong’s rebellion attempt in 90 BCE is found in the biography of Tian Guangming in Hanshu chapter 90. ↩︎
11. Jia Juanzhi is using hyperbole to emphasize the economic and cultural importance of the Qi (Shandong) and Chu (northern Jiangsu and Anhui) regions in Guandong. ↩︎
12. Since the beginning of Emperor Yuan’s reign, the hitherto prosperous region of Guandong had been hit by famines and epidemics so severe they drove people to cannibalism. ↩︎
13. For this quote, see source 1.1. ↩︎
14. This characterization of Chu is found in the Gongyang and Guliang commentaries to the Annals; see source 1.5. ↩︎
15. The Chinese considered it improper for fathers and sons to bathe and sleep in the same space. The “drinking through the nose” custom became a standard trope about indigenous peoples of the southern frontier, appearing in various later texts. ↩︎
16. Robes and caps were the standard men’s attire of the Chinese elite. ↩︎
17. That is, from the Nine Regions; see source 2.2. ↩︎