Han poetry

The ruling dynastic family of the Han dynasty was the Liu family, founded by Liu Bang, whose career ranged from being a minor official (sort of like a local sheriff during the rapid disintegration and chaos of the final years of the Qin dynasty) to being an outlaw and a rebel hiding out in the hills, to being the King of Chu during the Division of Qin into 18 states, or kingdoms.

His patronage of literature and the arts, as well as his connections with the unique culture of Chu would set a precedent for the rest of the dynasty which he founded, and which managed to keep much of the political power in the hands of the Liu family: often this was implemented by allowing Liu family princes a great deal of autonomy in their local areas, thus encouraging the development of subsidiary royal courts, besides the main imperial court; and, in some cases, this encouraged princely patronage of literature and the arts, with some greater diversity and cross-fertilization of artistic genres and styles.

Brushing characters with ink is archeologically attested to during the Han period, including on silk, hemp paper, and bamboo slips.

Methods such as stamping or marking on clay or engraving on stone were also used; and, though relatively durable required fairly elaborate craftsmanship to produce.

The extension of the Han empire into new areas introduced new and exotic concepts and material objects, which sometimes became the topics of works in the fu prose-poetry literary form.

In other cases, poems have been attributed to specific Han dynasty persons, or written in perspective of their persona, but the real author remains unknown.

Sima Xiangru (179–127 BC, also known as Szu-ma Hsiang-ju) was one of the most important poets of the Han dynastic era, writing in both the Chuci and the fu styles.

According to this story, during the beginning of his captivity in the Xiongnu empire Su Wu was treated harshly, to the point it is said of having to eat the lining of his coat for food and to drink snow which he melted for water.

The traditional version of the Chu Ci contains 17 major sections, anthologized with its current contents by Wang Yi, a 2nd-century AD librarian who served under Emperor Shun of Han, who appended his own verses derivative of the Chuci or "sao" style at the end of the collection, under the title of Nine Longings.

Liu An, the Prince of Huainan, and his literary circle were involved with the Chuci material, but the attribution of authorship of any particular poems is uncertain.

[8] The Han fu derived from the rhetorical expositions of the Intrigues of the Warring States and the Chuci,[9] which was traditionally considered to be the work of Qu Yuan, who was a wanderer through the countryside and villages of the Kingdom of Chu, after his exile from court.

[10] In other words, they were refined literary products, ornate, polished, and with an elite vocabulary; and, often the subject matter includes topics such as life in the palaces of the Han capital cities.

[11] The famous Han dynasty astronomer, mathematician, inventor, geographer, cartographer, artist, poet, statesman, and literary scholar Zhang Heng (78–139 CE) wrote a fu about his own, personal experience (real or imagined) of getting out of the city and its politics and getting back to the country and nature.

They are influential both toward the gushi ("old style") poetic form, but also for their "tone of brooding melancholy....Anonymous voices speaking to us from a shadowy past, they sound a note of sadness that is to dominate the poetry of the centuries that follow.

The Music Bureau was a Chinese governmental institution existing to historical and archeological evidence at various times during the history of China, including an incarnation during the Qin dynasty.