Quick questions on Han social structure and the family: HSC Ancient History

Beneath the imperial family, Han government was increasingly staffed by a class of scholar-officials known as the shi. Unlike a purely hereditary aristocracy, the Han developed a genuinely novel system for recruiting officials based on demonstrated Confucian virtue and learning.

Merchants (shang) occupied a genuinely contradictory position. Confucian ideology ranked them last of the four classes on the ground that trade produced no goods and profited unfairly from the labour of others, and successive Han governments enacted sumptuary laws restricting merchants from wearing silk, riding in carriages, carrying weapons, and holding public office. Merchant households were sometimes separately registered and taxed.

Slavery in Han China existed outside the four-class scheme. People became enslaved chiefly through debt bondage (defaulting debtors sold themselves or family members), penal enslavement (a punishment for serious crimes, sometimes extended to a criminal's family), or capture in war and border conflict. Enslaved people served in wealthy private households, in some state workshops, and occasionally in the palace itself. Unlike the Spartan Helot system or Roman chattel slavery on a plantation scale, Han slavery was smaller in overall scale relative to the free peasant population and was not the primary basis of agricultural production, which rested chiefly on free peasant smallholders and tenants.