By the Qin and early Han dynasties, writing, while not wholly democratized, was far more common than it had been in earlier Chinese life. Evidence for any sort of ‘popular literacy’ is still tenuous and circumstantial at this point in history, but it is far more evident than it has so far been and it is absolutely not an unreasonable theory.

     A translation of a passage regarding what to do in a city under siege found in the Mozi, a compendium of Mohist philosophy originating in the Qin dynasty, reads,

“...Make regulations for the preparations of defense and set them up [...]. Order all those who are traveling back and forth to look at and follow them.” [1]

     The inherent assumption in this text, that a regular citizen would be able to read posted instructions, is clear. Those who penned the Mozi must have believed this to be an effective strategy, and it is a strategy that is clearly dependent on a population that is at least to some extent literate.

     At excavations of Han military installments, a large amount of written text has been uncovered. Among these, there are texts that show evidence of people learning how to write, as many documents would have been simple enough for a layperson to create without the lengthy training of a scribe. Such finds include wooden strips with repeated characters for common words, over and over again. In another instance, a soldier is reported as being able to write reports, but only somewhat able to read laws and statutes written in a far more complicated, technical style [2]. Letters have been found, written from common-born soldiers to family, and in one particularly vivid instance, a member of the literati was asked to help a commoner write a letter to his family. Most is clearly dictated, but a postscript is attached in a different handwriting, including a note saying "Written by myself". [3].

     Perhaps we do not have the concrete knowledge of scribal training and curriculums when it comes to the unrecorded history of the less privileged, but we have enough evidence to suggest that these are not isolated cases, but rather that some not insignificant fraction of Han Dynasty China, more than two thousand years ago, was functionally literate [4].

1. Robin D.S. Yates, Writing and Literacy in Ancient China (University of Washington Press, 2011), 342
2. Yates, Writing and Literacy in Ancient China, 361-2
3. Yates, Writing and Literacy in Ancient China, 363
4. Yates, Writing and Literacy in Ancient China, 367-9