Quick questions on China's geographical and historical context under the Han dynasty: HSC Ancient History

Compiled by the court historian Sima Qian and completed around 91 BC, the Shiji is a comprehensive history running from the legendary Yellow Emperor to Sima Qian's own time under Emperor Wu, and is the earliest connected narrative of the Qin collapse, the Chu-Han contention, and the first six decades of Han rule. It established the annals-tables-treatises-biographies structure that every later official Chinese history followed. Its limitation is personal and immediate: Sima Qian was castrated around 99 BC as punishment for defending the disgraced general Li Ling to Emperor Wu, and continued to serve at Wudi's court afterwards, so passages touching the emperor's own reign must be weighed against that biography.

Begun by Ban Biao, continued by his son Ban Gu, and completed after Ban Gu's death in prison in AD 92 by his sister Ban Zhao, the Hanshu was the first history to cover a single dynasty in full, from Gaozu's founding in 206 BC to Wang Mang's fall in AD 23, in far greater administrative and biographical detail than the Shiji. Its limitation is that it was written for the restored Eastern Han court that had just overthrown Wang Mang, so its treatment of him as an illegitimate usurper who lost the Mandate of Heaven reflects the new dynasty's political need to delegitimise its predecessor.

Both histories operate within a broadly Confucian tradition of "praise and blame" historiography, judging rulers' actions by their virtue and treating historical narrative as a vehicle for moral instruction. This lens is a strength, since it drove both historians to record detailed evidence of good and bad government, but also a limitation, since it can flatten complex political and economic causes, such as Wang Mang's land and currency crises, into simple verdicts on individual character.

Excavated near Changsha, Hunan, between 1972 and 1974, the three Mawangdui tombs belonged to the family of a Han chancellor of the kingdom of Changsha and are dated to the early Western Han. They yielded the remarkably preserved body of the tomb occupant known as the Marquise of Dai, a silk funeral banner depicting the journey to the afterlife, and, in the third tomb, a large cache of silk manuscripts, including two versions of the Laozi (Tao Te Ching) that predate any surviving transmitted copy, together with medical and astronomical texts. Their value lies in physical, ideology-free evidence of elite Western Han life, belief and textual culture; their limitation is that they describe one family's world, not the empire's politics, and cannot narrate events on their own.

Beyond Mawangdui, excavated bamboo strips such as those from the Yinqueshan tombs in Shandong preserved the previously lost Art of War attributed to Sun Bin, resolving a long debate about whether he and Sunzi were the same person, while bamboo slips recovered from Han frontier garrisons record the everyday administration of the northern defences the Great Wall was built to support. Tomb models, or mingqi, pottery and wood figurines of houses, granaries, watchtowers and farm animals, buried as substitutes for real goods, give historians a detailed visual record of Han domestic architecture and agriculture that no literary text supplies. Their shared limitation is that all are fragmentary, recovered piecemeal, and mute on the political narrative that the Shiji and Hanshu were written to provide.