Academic Carriers in the Early Han Dynasty

There must be academic carriers so that human knowledge and thoughts can exist and spread. There were mainly two types of academic carriers in ancient China: scholars and books. However, after the incident of the “burning books and burying Confucians” in the Qin Dynasty, as well as the peasant uprisings and the wars for imperial throne in the last years of the Qin Dynasty, both carriers suffered great losses. Therefore, the new regime of the Han Dynasty took many measures to protect the academic carriers so that the official and private academic carriers recovered gradually. This chapter will focus on the situation of scholars and books during the early years of the Han Dynasty. First, the scholars resumed their freedom of holding books and teaching activities soon after the Han Dynasty was founded; many of them took office in government or taught in the official schools, even serving as the boshi, while even more of them taught privately among the civilians, who were the disciples of various schools of teaching, especially of the Confucian school, who continued their teaching of the Confucian 6-Classics. Second, the imperial government and many local officials paid much attention to collecting and acquiring lost books from civilians so that countless lost books returned to the official book storage.