Word: hans
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Near the middle of his arresting academic study of the craftsmen of the Qin (221-207 B.C.) and Han (206 B.C.-220 A.D.) dynasties, Barbieri-Low - an assistant professor of Chinese history at the University of California, Santa Barbara - describes the frenetic Eastern Market of the Han capital of Chang'an (present-day Xi'an). Established in 201 B.C. by Liu Bang, the first Han Emperor, this shopper's paradise was surfeited with stalls hawking everything from silk to cheap tableware. At a whopping 5.4 million sq. ft. (500,000 sq m), it covered more space, as Barbieri-Low points...
...point he gently exhorts the reader to place a hand on a life-size photo reproduction of a handprint left by its maker on a ceramic brick, taken from an unearthed Han tomb wall. It's a hauntingly visceral exercise, like shaking hands with a dead man, but precisely the type of immanent encounter with a past typically coffined in museum display cases that Barbieri-Low hopes to inspire. "Understanding these lives," he says, "will allow us to humanize the material remains of the past...
...hazards: dermatitis for lacquerers, mercury poisoning for gilders and exhaustion for manacled convict artisans, often worked into their graves. Convicts, it seems, had it even worse than slaves (who by some counts may have numbered as many as 1 million, or 2% of the total population, during the former Han dynasty) since slaves were considered valuable property and used mostly for light or clerical duties. One to six convict laborers, on the other hand, died each day at a typical large imperial worksite, building roads, opulent palaces and tombs, including the most famous of all: the mausoleum of Qin Shihuangdi...
...Mass-production of goods is Barbieri-Low's dominant leitmotif. Long before China was factory to the world, he suggests, it was factory to itself. The artisans were indispensable cogs in the Qin and Han imperial machinery. Barbieri-Low splendidly reanimates their lost lives, and gives them due credit for greasing the wheels of China's first empires. It's the same sort of credit due to those shunned migrant workers now constructing Olympic stadiums in Beijing, anonymously propping up the superpower of tomorrow...
...recent paper published in the biology journal Proteomics, which invoked ideas of creationism with little supporting evidence for the claim, has caused controversy within the scientific community. The authors of the study, Mohamad Warda and Jin Han, scientists at Inje University in South Korea, used the idea of a “mighty creator” in a paper entitled “Mitochondria, the missing link between body and soul.” The scientists related creationism to proteomics, the study of the structure and functions of proteins, to explain why different forms of life have similar mitochondria...