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NSWAncient HistorySection II (Ancient Societies): China during the Han dynasty
Quick questions on Everyday life and the roles of women in Han China: HSC Ancient History
2short Q&A pairs drawn directly from our worked dot-point answer. For full context and worked exam questions, read the parent dot-point page.
What is housing?Show answer
Most Han peasants lived in small, one- or two-room houses with rammed-earth or wattle-and-daub walls and thatched roofs, often sharing the household compound with pigs and chickens. Because timber and thatch rarely survive, archaeologists reconstruct peasant housing mainly from postholes and rammed-earth foundations rather than intact buildings.
What is dress?Show answer
Dress marked status sharply. Commoners wore hemp or ramie, a coarse plant fibre; the elite wore silk, woven in a range of qualities and, for officials, coloured and cut according to rank. Sumptuary law reinforced the divide by legally barring merchants, despite their wealth, from wearing silk at all. Mawangdui again supplies the physical extreme of this contrast: among Lady Dai's garments was a plain, unlined silk gauze robe (su sha danyi) reportedly weighing only about 49 grams, a level of weaving skill that no written account of Han silk could convey as vividly as the surviving object itself.
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