Research on the Interactive Relationship between the Spatial Evolution of Handicraft Production and the State Form in the Pre-Qin Capital

Abstract

The period from pre-Qin to Han Dynasty in ancient China was an important stage of the transformation from “kingdom” to “empire”. The research on the productive space that served and supplied the power subjects in the capital cities of ancient China with the theocratic system was a part of the previous capital research which was less noticed. Meanwhile, the research value of the handicraft workshop space in the economic archaeology has not been taken into account. In this study, 16 major capital cities with relatively abundant archaeological data from the Three Dynasties to the Qin and Han Dynasties were selected, and the layout, location, attributes and spatial form of the handicraft workshops in these cities were compared and summarized by using the published archaeological reports and other materials related to handicraft workshops through the classification and time-sharing analyses of the relic information. It was found that, as time passed, the evolution of the handicraft workshops space in the pre-Qin capital city showed several features, such as the marginalization of the spatial location, the hierarchization of the industrial categories, and the scalization of production areas. (1) The handicraft production space expanded to the outer region of the capital city, which was gradually far away from the palace area space over time. (2) Craft production space area was gradually scaled up, with the emergence of a centralized handicraft production area. (3) There were hierarchical differences in handicraft industry categories, manifesting the spatial distribution differences between ceremonial and practical handicraft locations. During the Three Dynasties, the demand for the spatial production of ceremonial articles represented by bronzes was higher than the practical demand, and after the Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States Period, the demand for practicality gradually began to increase over that for ceremonial products.
The change of the state form was a decisive factor in the spatial layout of handicraft production. In the early capital cities, the important government-run handicraft production space was part of the “state apparatus” and belonged to the power space. The military ideology and the way of war were the secondary most important factors affecting the spatial layout of the production, especially in the Spring and Autumn and Warring States Periods. Generally speaking, the status of productive space is declining with the enhancement of state power.