The third important book of the Han period was the Lun Heng (Critique of Opinions) of Wang Ch’ung, which appeared in the first century of the Christian era.  Wang Ch’ung advocated rational thinking and tried to pave the way for a free natural science, in continuation of the beginnings which the natural philosophers of the later Chou period had made.  The book analyses reports in ancient literature and customs of daily life, and shows how much they were influenced by superstition and by ignorance of the facts of nature.  From this attitude a modern science might have developed, as in Europe towards the end of the Middle Ages; but the gentry had every reason to play down this tendency which, with its criticism of all that was traditional, might have proceeded to an attack on the dominance of the gentry and their oppression especially of the merchants and artisans.  It is fascinating to observe how it was the needs of the merchants and seafarers of Asia Minor and Greece that provided the stimulus for the growth of the classic sciences, and how on the contrary the growth of Chinese science was stifled because the gentry were so strongly hostile to commerce and navigation, though both had always existed.

There were great literary innovations in the field of poetry.  The splendour and elegance at the new imperial court of the Han dynasty attracted many poets who sang the praises of the emperor and his court and were given official posts and dignities.  These praises were in the form of grandiloquent, overloaded poetry, full of strange similes and allusions, but with little real feeling.  In contrast, the many women singers and dancers at the court, mostly slaves from southern China, introduced at the court southern Chinese forms of song and poem, which were soon adopted and elaborated by poets.  Poems and dance songs were composed which belonged to the finest that Chinese poetry can show—­full of natural feeling, simple in language, moving in content.

Our knowledge of the arts is drawn from two sources—­literature, and the actual discoveries in the excavations.  Thus we know that most of the painting was done on silk, of which plenty came into the market through the control of silk-producing southern China.  Paper had meanwhile been invented in the second century B.C., by perfecting the techniques of making bark-cloth and felt.  Unfortunately nothing remains of the actual works that were the first examples of what the Chinese everywhere were beginning to call “art”.  “People”, that is to say the gentry, painted as a social pastime, just as they assembled together for poetry, discussion, or performances of song and dance; they painted as an aesthetic pleasure and rarely as a means of earning.  We find philosophic ideas or greetings, emotions, and experiences represented by paintings—­paintings with fanciful or ideal landscapes; paintings representing life and environment of the cultured class in idealized form, never naturalistic either in fact or in intention.