The organization of imperial workshops during the Han dynasty (China)

From the earliest period of dynastic rule in China, specialized groups of artisans under official control supplied the ruling house with luxury articles and weapons of war. The Former Han (206 BC–AD 9) is the first period for which we have sufficient information to study the organization of these artisans and their workshops.; Chapter 1 details the macro-organization of Han imperial workshops—the position of state-run workshops and factories within the political, economic, and geographic structure of the state. It follows a narrative structure which begins by describing workshops within the palace compound and expands outward to discuss larger factories in the capital and provinces. Factories were established according to the dictates of military strategy and following such practical guidelines as proximity to raw materials and labor resources. Overlapping production units provided goods of different quality to different markets and prevented reliance on one source for vital products.; Chapters 2–5 narrow the scope of investigation by selecting a single imperial factory, the Western Workshop of Shu Commandery, in order to study its micro-organization. Micro-organization is defined as the inner workings of a workshop or factory, encompassing all stages of the production process and their management. Relying on a critically selected mixture of inscriptional and historical sources, as well as technical and stylistic analyses of the lacquer vessels produced at this factory, it is argued that the artisans' labor was divided along very fine lines of specialization as part of a production process similar to the modern assembly-line method of mass production. Other mass-production tools such as turntables, pattern books, and standardized molds were used to produce thousands of nearly identical lacquer vessels on a short production schedule. As the factory organization became more refined, the quality of the artistic output declined. The factory management structure was modelled on the structure of the smallest unit of centrally-controlled regional administration, the xian “county.” Parallel to bureaus in the county government which managed various affairs such as law-enforcement and taxation, bureaus in the factory structure handled different media like bronze or lacquer.