The Reading History Of Han Dynasty

Reading is a common activity in our daily life, its development plays an very important role in promoting both the quality and culture of our people and society. As the first dynasty to realize truly unity of the whole country in ancient history, the politic, economy, culture, thought and education of Han Dynasty had achieved big improvements compared with former periods. The academia has made deep researches on the major academics and thoughts of the Han Dynasty, but only few of them focus on the cultural life of those common people in the grass-root society. This competition will discuss and analyze the ability, target and preference towards reading activities among different classes of the Han Dynasty by combining all kinds of books, portrait stones and historical records together which were broadcast widely in the society. The whole competition has four chapters:Chapter one is going to analyze the readers from different classes. We will discuss their ability of reading, how to read, why were they read and the features of reading from the angle of the level of their education and knowledge with some bamboo materials which were found by historians.Chapter two is going to arrange all kinds of books spread in the Han Dynasty. We will search the historical records, bamboo material and tablets to summarize the spread of different books in the Han Dynasty. The spread of some important Confucian classics will be listed in tabular forms to analyze. From the summary we can see how did those books spread at different periods and places.Chapter three is going to analyze the image of readers and the scenes of reading in the Han Dynasty from some pictures of the portrait stones. Besides, we will combine the topics with the contents of portrait stones to see which kind of books did the people in the Han Dynasty prefer to read. At the end of this chapter, we will give an example of the portrait stones in Wu Liang Temple to show how do the portrait stones reflect the reading in the Han Dynasty.The last chapter we will investigate the attitude of both the upper class and the grass-root class towards reading and studying through the historical records. After the investigation, we can see how did reading activity influence the institutions and change the general mood of the society.From the summary and analysis of the four chapters, we know that reading was universal in the Han Dynasty, people loved reading and studying very much. Reading’s key functions of maintaining the stability of a country and uplifting the quality of people will also be understood after the investigation.