Valerie Hansen

How the Residents of Turfan used Textiles as Money, 273–796 ce

Textiles, grain, coins; people living in the Silk Road oasis of Turfan, 160 km south-east of Urumqi in todays Xinjiang, used all three items as money between 273 and 769. The city of Gaochang (some 40 km east of todays Turfan) was one of the most important cities on the northern route around the Taklamakan Desert, and many of its inhabitants were buried in the adjacent Astana and Karakhoja graveyards. The regions dry climate has preserved an extensive group of paper documents dating to before, and after, the Tang conquest of the city in 640. The residents of Turfan buried their dead with shoes, belts, hats and clothing made from recycled paper with writing on it. These records offer an unparalleled glimpse of how people living along the Silk Road used textiles as currency.

Negotiating Daily Life in Traditional China: How Ordinary People Used Contracts 600-1400.

This intriguing book explores how ordinary people in traditional China used contracts to facilitate the transactions of their daily lives, as they bought, sold, rented, or borrowed land, livestock, people, or money. In the process it illuminates specific everyday concerns during Chinas medieval transformation. Valerie Hansen translates and analyzes surviving contracts and also draws on tales of the supernatural, rare legal sources, plays, language texts, and other anecdotal evidence to describe how contracts were actually used. She explains that the educated wrote their own contracts, whereas the illiterate paid scribes to draft them and read them aloud. The contracts reveal much about everyday life: problems with inflation that resulted from the introduction of the first paper money in the world; the persistence of womens rights to own and sell land at a time when their lives were becoming more constricted; and the litigiousness of families, which were complicated products of remarriages, adoptions, and divorces. The Chinese even armed their dead with contracts asserting ownership of their grave plots, and Hansen provides details of an underworld court system in which the dead could sue and be sued. Illustrations and maps enrich a book that will be fascinating for anyone interested in Chinese life and society.

Changing Gods in Medieval China, 1127-1276.

In her study of medieval Chinese lay practices and beliefs, Valerie Hansen argues that social and economic developments underlay religious changes in the Southern Song. Unfamiliar with the contents of Buddhist and Daoist texts, the common people hired the practitioner or prayed to the god they thought could cure the ill or bring rain. As the economy rapidly developed, the gods, like the people who worshiped them, diversified: their realm of influence expanded as some gods began to deal on the national grain market and others advised their followers on business transactions. In order to trace this evolution, the author draws information from temple inscriptions, literary notes, the administrative law code, and local histories. By contrasting differing rates of religious change in the lowland and highland regions of the lower Yangzi valley, Hansen suggests that the commercial and social developments were far less uniform than previously thought. In 1100, nearly all people in South China worshiped gods who had been local residents prior to their deaths. The increasing mobility of cultivators in the lowland, rice-growing regions resulted in the adoption of gods from other places. Cults in the isolated mountain areas showed considerably less change.