Originally Posted by
zoner16
This doesn't have much to do with the status of women deteriorating specifically during the Three Kingdoms era. The curtailment of the punishment for rape was part of a larger back and forth over capital punishments that was going on in the Wei court. The status of women remained mostly the same throughout the Later Han-3K-Jin transition.
The family extermination to the X degree punishment was used if anyone in the clan had committed treason, not just the patriarch. There are at least a couple instances of it being invoked due to the actions of imperial court ladies.
It's still not correct. The state of Eastern (or Sun) Wu was not seen as less civilized. While they certainly ruled over certain peoples that were, so did everyone else. In fact, the remaining apparatus of the state of Wu became the bulwark of Han civilization following the collapse of Western Jin. It's literary and scholarly traditions were melded into the Eastern Jin court, thus merging with the imperial mainstream. It was helped by the fact that it had made its power base in the region of Western Chu and Sun Ce had aped the legacy of Xiang Yu, thus positing Wu as another Hegemon.
Certain scholars in later years tried to make the case that it was a "barbaric" state, but this was mostly to undermine its place in the narrative of the Three Kingdoms for political effect. The writings of the time make it clear that the northerners were treating it as a rogue Han province, and Shu honestly gets hit with the "barbarian" label a lot more than Wu was, mostly due to its courting of various tribal groups to fight Wei and its employment of some very unsavory characters.
Lady Wu was hardly an isolated case. Women played just as much of a role in the Wei court as well, and probably did at the Shu court, but Shu's records are very incomplete and their state was mostly run by the army anyways. The Dowager of a dynasty typically had the type of power that Lady Wu had, and Dowager Guo came very close in Wei. Her role gets overshadowed by the conflict between Sima Yi and Cao Shuang because it wasn't as dramatic, but she controlled the court faction during that affair and was a political kingmaker until Sima Zhao became too powerful to be constrained. The unholy mess that preceded the War of the Eight Princes in Western Jin shows that women were capable of wielding just as much power as they had during the Han.
If Du Yu's work on the great women of history at that point (the end of the Three Kingdoms) had not been lost, we certainly could have gotten many more examples.
That single photo is not representative of all Han shields. It's one of the smallest I've seen, and I suspect that that's because it's made entirely of metal, whereas most Chinese shields of the era were usually mostly wood.
The Qin era shields found in the Tomb of Qin Shi Huangdi were about 28 inches long, and it seems that Former Han kept this model. However, shields during Later Han were specifically noted to have gotten larger from the preceding dynasty. Double arc shields from the Warring States have been found that measured 36 inches tall, and the tower shields used by the Wu and Yue people during the same era and the Chu-Han contention were of the same height and even boarder. "Great shields," tall enough for a man to hide behind, are textually attested in the Book of Later Han and they continue to appear during the Records of the Three Kingdoms in the wars in the west and north.
"Polearm" to me is any spear, halberd, pike, etc that is a weapon on a pole. The length, number of hands used, or its conjunction with a shield isn't a distinction I make.
The Jian had been losing favor for centuries. It was already outnumbered in imperial armories by the Dao by the turn of the calendar, and imperial regulations considered the Dao a more reliable weapon for standard issue to the troops. The Dao was also always paired with a shield in discussion of martial forms.
Among the weapons of the time, the melee trifecta referenced in the tactical discourses during Former Han was halberd-sword and shield-pike and short spear, to be used as the terrain and situation demanded. The former is a two handed weapon, the middle with a shield, and the latter a mix of the two, as the short spear was meant to be used with a shield but a pike was not.
The commonality of shields in Chinese warfare has been a debate for years in academia, but there's little evidence for anything conclusive. References to shields in the histories come and go depending on who is fighting and where. Chinese warfare is far from monolithic. Korea, and especially Japan have their own military traditions that have their own evolutions as well.
Unfortunately, most Chinese historians at the time had little interest in soldier's equipment, so the best we can do is guestimate. Surviving period artwork depicts a range of shield types used across the empire at various points in the conflict. Specifically, one can see the rise of the long spined oblong shield found in some reliefs at the end of Later Han, into artwork from the state of Wei, then finally culminating to its huge prevalence in Jin dynasty artwork. Again, the closet thing to this kind of shield is the oblong ones used by the Spear Guard and Yellow Dragon units, though they're missing the prominent spine, they're still gripped rather than strapped, and the Yellow Dragon version has the metal boss that wouldn't be present until the Norther Dynasties.
While it may not be right for all units to have shields along this line, given that's where most shields would end up by the end of the period, it seems a logical progression point, with the smaller hand-gripped shields being starting militia equipment.
And not all peoples in the west fought like that and even those that did were not bound only to those types of tactics. Likewise, Chinese armies could adopt formations and tactics along those lines when it suited them. There was even a specific unit designation for "shock troops."
You misunderstand me. I'm not saying that everywhere else was conscripting like crazy. I'm saying that the Han did not conscript nearly as much as you seem to think.
Shoring up the numbers was exactly what conscripts were meant to do in the Han. The armies created for the Han-Xiongnu Wars and most other conflicts were drawn from the professional armies at the capitol and the border garrisons as well as the reservists that were regularly trained and called up for service. In Former Han, the reserve system was empire wide, but in Later Han it became restricted to the frontier commanderies. Conscripts were only pressed into service if military setbacks or interior rebellions meant that these latter forces were either unavailable, insufficient, or too far out of the way. This is what happened during the fall of the Han, but the surviving states transitioned away from this by the time of the actual Three Kingdoms division, though they did so in different ways.