High-quality lacquer was brilliantly smooth and virtually indestructible. Fine pieces like our cup required up to 30 or more separate coats, with long drying and hardening times between each, and so it could have taken up to about a month to make. Hardly surprising, then, that they were inordinately expensive-you could buy more than ten bronze cups for the price of one in lacquer-so lacquer cups were strictly reserved for top management, the Imperial governors controlling the frontiers of the Empire. Although the Han Chinese and the Roman empires covered roughly the same land area, a census conducted in China, only two years before our cup was made, came up with the wonderfully precise figure of a population of 57,671,400 individuals. Here's Roel Sterckx again:
高級漆器的表面十分光滑，同時又非常堅固。如本文中的耳杯這樣的精品漆器需要涂抹三十多層漆。每抹完一次便需耐心等待它干燥變硬， 因此制作周期需要一個月之久。毫不奇怪，它的價格十分昂貴，一只漆杯的價格相當于十只青銅杯，因此僅限駐守邊疆的將領等位高權重的人使用。漢朝的領土與羅馬帝國大致相當，但人口更多。漆杯制作前兩年的一次人口普查得到了五千七百六十七萬一千四百人的精確數字。胡司德說：
"One of things we need to keep in mind, of course, is that the Chinese Empire is immense, and that it straddles a hugely diverse geographic region. And in the case of the Han, we're talking about a distance that stretches from North Korea to Vietnam. Contact between people is obviously not always very obvious, and so the circulation of goods, the circulation of imperially sanctioned objects, together of course with texts, is part of that symbolical assertion of what it means to be an empire. You might not see people who are part of the same empire, but you might actually-by witnessing the goods that are produced across the empire-feel, or have a sense of belonging to, that greater imagined community in many ways."
我們必須了解，中國幅員遼闊，人口眾多。漢朝的領土從朝鮮一直延伸到越南。但民眾間的交流并不頻繁，因此商品的流通、皇室專用物品的流通以及統一的文字，便成為帝國統一性的象征。你也許無法同帝國其他部分的百姓碰面，但各地產物的流通能讓你找到身屬一個龐大帝國的認同感。
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