Materials from Homer Hasenpflug Dubs
and the Han Dynasty History Project

The materials in this site derive largely from Homer H. Dubs’ project to translate the Han shu, which he began publishing in 1938 under the title History of the Former Han Dynasty.  Some of the material comes from the now defunct Han Dynasty History Project at the University of Washington. Regular users of Dubs’ three-volume translation have often wondered what became of the “forthcoming” Glossary to which readers were often referred in the notes. Although Dubs completed a draft, the Glossary was never published. The ms. eventually made its way, along with other of Dubs’ materials, to the Han Dynasty Project headed by Prof. Jack L Dull.  Some of the material became the basis for Ch’ü T’ung-tsu’s Han Social Structure, Hsü Cho-yun’s Han Agriculture, and Rafe deCrespigny’s Northern Frontier: The Policies and Strategies of the Later Han Empire. Another volume on communication and transportation in the Ch’in and Han periods was being prepared by Professor Lo Jung-pang but remained unfinished when the author fell ill. A draft is among Professor Lo’s papers in the Shields Library at the University of California, Davis. The Glossary and other of the Dubs/Han Dynasty Project materials also remained unpublished.

Following Prof. Dull’s untimely death in 1996, the Han Dynasty Project ended and the materials became scattered.  Now, thanks to the assistance of Wiliam G. Crowell, Prof. R. Kent Guy, Director of the China Program at the University of Washington, and Prof. Karen Turner of College of the Holy Cross, e-Asia has acquired the Glossary manuscript as well as a draft copy of part of Dub's proposed fourth volume of HFHD.  These materials have been scanned and are being edited by Dr. Crowell and Jeffrey A. Howard with a view to making them available through e-Asia. Still missing are translations of material from the Han shu “Treatises” (志) section and "Tables" (表 ) sections and of the final two chapters (100A&B) of the Han shu, which contains the history of the Ban family and the poetic epigraphs for each of the Han shu chapters.  (Some of this material is reportedly among Dubs' papers in the Bodleian Library at Oxford.)  Also missing is a manuscript of a biographical dictionary compiled by the Han Project by extracting the biographical entries from the Glossary and assembling them in alphabetical order. Finally, early drafts or translated materials for additional volumes in the Han Project. have been lost.  Should these materials be recovered, e-Asia would be happy to post them as well. Persons having information on the whereabouts of these materials are asked to contact e-asia.

The materials presented here are in some ways dated, since they do not take into account the scholarship of the last thirty odd years. In particular, the authors were unable to take advantage of the archeological finds of recent times and such works at Michael Loewe’s magisterial biographical dictionary. Still, the materials remain useful, both as a complement to HFHD and as an independent reference. Taken together, HFHD, the Glossary, and the other material either translate or paraphrase most of the Han shu.  It was an extraordinary achievement, and it is unfortunate that more of the material was not published.  Moreover, Dubs and his collaborators made extensive use of the materials found in Wang Hsien-ch’ien’s Han shu pu-chu as well as that found in later encyclopedias such as the T’ai-p’ing yu-lan, and works by Sung, Ming and Ch’ing scholars.

The Glossary now exists in two parts -- that for Han shu 1-5 and 100 A&B and that for Han shu 6-12 and 99A, B & C. In the first part, entries are in alphabetical order, which was Dubs' original format.  The revised version of this portion was only recently found in the Seattle basement of one of Professor Dull's former graduate students.  (An earlier version dated 1936 with handwritten comments by J.J.L. Duyvendak was found in a Leiden bookstore by Professor Anthony Barbieri-Low and donated to the Bodliean Library).  In the second part, entries are organized according to the order in which the explained term appears in the HFHD. Dubs was apparently in the midst of reorganizing the Glossary when he passed away.  His own draft "Foreward" to the materials appears below and explains his approach and some of the limitations of the material.

Although the use of the Wade-Giles romanization is becoming less common, we decided not to convert the Dubs materials to pinyin in part because of the amount of work that would have been required, but more importantly, in order to remain consistent with the usage in HFHD. For similar reasons we have not corrected non-standard transcriptions.  In several cases Dubs adopted alternative renderings (e.g., yüan rather than  wan for 宛 and hsieh rather than hsüeh for 薛 ); to facilitate cross referencing, we have left these unaltered in the Glossary. Neither have we changed Dubs' English spelling, which sometimes follows British usage. The editors have made only minimal textual changes to ensure clarity of meaning; additions made by the editors are usually enclosed in  {--} brackets. Notes enclosed in square brackets [--] prefaced by “p.”  indicate pencilled changes made by Dubs to his earlier drafts.  Finally, in a few cases Dubs changed his mind about the rendering of a title or term, using the corrected version in the Glossary (e.g., at HFHD III.163 changing "worthy inferiors" to Inferior Gentlemen" for 下士 ). In such cases, we have also included the original version for clarity.

To identify place names, Dubs gave the modern equivalent for the Republican (pre-1949) period or often referred to the Ta-Ch’ing yi-t’ung-chih.  The latter references were often simply taken from Wang Hsien-ch’ien’s notes in the Han-shu pu-chu.  For place names which occur as the head word of an entry, we have included in {--} brackets the pages and coordinates  in T’an Ch’i-hsiang (Tan Qixiang)  谭其骧, ed.  Chung-kuo li-shih ti-t'u chi  中國歷史地圖集, vol 2. Ch'in, Hsi Han, Tung Han 秦, 西汉, 东汉  Shanghai, 1982.   Unfortunately, we have not been able to provide similar references for place names in the body of the text.  Moreover, not all place names appear in T'an's atlas, particularly for some of the smaller marquisates.

To assist readers in following Dubs’ citations to the original source, we have included below a bibliography of the works referenced.  Unfortunately, this list is not complete, and the edition used by him is not always known.

We hope that making this material available online will at last in some measure bring to completion the efforts of Professor Dubs and his collaborators and the members of the Han Dynasty History Project.  Although we have tried to clean up the text, no doubt typos and inconsistencies remain.  We shall correct these as we discover them and as readers bring them to our attention.

Foreward by Homer H. Dubs

This Glossary contains a discussion, in alphabetical order, of the names of places, of persons, and official titles in the first five and last chapters of the History of the Earlier Han Dynasty.  Whatever material could be gathered in a reasonable time has been put there.  When the History gives a person a biography, that biography has been abstracted for the Glossary.  Such abstracts should however be used with caution, since time has been lacking to make a complete or entirely accurate translation. [p: Little attempt has moreover been made to criticize these biographies; the reader should understand that my biography is merely an account of what the Han shu says.  I give Han interpretations of terms and locations of places, i.e., what the best scholars believed in Han times.  But the meaning of an ancient person, term, place-name etc., may have actually been different in Chou times.]  Discussions that, in the Chinese, are notes to the text, when they concern places, names, or titles, have been transferred to the Glossary, hence much important explanatory material is to be found here.

Jan. 9, 1935.
Homer H. Dubs.

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