✍️ About the Author

As a hobby, I read and obsess over the “Four Anterior Histories” (Shiji, Hanshu, Hou Hanshu, and Sanguo Zhi). By profession, I am a linguist. I enjoy collecting linguistic expressions from these texts and discovering patterns within them.

• I began studying the Hanshu (Book of Han) in 2015.
• Since 2019, I have been writing about ancient China’s Han dynasty under the pen name Zya^周雅.
  • My primary interest is in the language people used at the time and how historians recorded it.
  • I fundamentally treat these historical texts not merely as historical sources but as linguistic data and literary works.
• After completing Hanshu Pamphlet 10: Working Women in 2025, I concluded my series of crowdfunded self-publications and am now focusing on blog posts.

📝 About the Blog

The blog title Beauty, Mystery, and Death comprises three keywords that Ya^雅 has selected to represent the Hanshu. In the world of the Hanshu, people showed preferential treatment to beauty—particularly beautiful men—even in public settings. They took mystery seriously in both major decisions and trivial daily matters, consulting omens and divination. Death by one’s own hand to avoid disgrace was common, often for seemingly minor reasons.

The main purpose of this blog is to trace the lifestyles and mindsets of people in the Hanshu world who held these values.

On this blog, Ya^雅 obsesses over individual words and characters in the original classical Chinese texts, extracting insights like squeezing oil from stone. Ya^雅 is not a historian. Rather than asking “what happened,” I ask “what was said.” Rather than judging how factual the historical accounts are, I examine how they were expressed.

I process information extracted from texts to make it as accessible as possible and immediately usable for creative purposes. I introduce facts that are (at least to Ya^雅) fascinating. Coverage ranges from small-talk material like the origin of the thumbs-up gesture to nerdy deep dives like Cao Cao’s Nine-Distillation Spring Wine in Romance of the Three Kingdoms.

📑 Recommended Posts

This blog currently has 201 posts. If this is your first visit, start with these representative posts!

Encyclopedia of Han Dynasty Life

• 🐾 In Search of Han Dynasty Cats: A Very Brief History of Cats in Ancient China (2020-08-18)
• That Wine Cao Cao Presented to Emperor Xian: An Otaku’s Delusion of Providing the Most Detailed Information in Korean About Jiuyun Chunjiu (2021-09-03)
• Various Ways to Express White (2023-08-03)
• Why Both Interpretation and Translation End in ‘Yeok’ (譯): The Semantic Expansion of Yi (2024-03-10)
• Was Castration Really More Disgraceful Than Execution? (2025-07-04)

Reading Romance of the Three Kingdoms

• Zhuge Liang vs. Zhou Yu, Who Originally Had the Feather Fan?: Synthesizing Records from Eastern Jin’s Yulin, Northern Song’s Chibi Huaigu, and Yuan Dynasty’s Gejiang Touzi (2021-08-08)
• Brothers Are Limbs, Wife and Children Are Garments?: What the “Romance” Actually “Distorted” (2024-02-09)
• ‘Sunlang’ and ‘Zhoulang’, The Divergent Fates of Two Beauties: The Evolution of Zhou Lang (2025-11-09)

Three Kingdoms Q&A

• Women’s Arms and Martial Arts in the Late Han Dynasty (2024-06-30)
• Cleaning Products Used by Han Dynasty People (2025-04-05)

Miscellany

• What Did Song and Ming Dynasty People Put in Their Sachets? (2022-07-02)
• 🍵 Tea and Cultural Victory: A Pride Battle Between the Southern and Northern Dynasties (2023-08-15)
• 👍 Did the Thumbs-Up Gesture Exist in Traditional China? (2024-03-30)
• Ancient Chinese Sheet Masks: Hua Tuo’s Dermatological Prescription (2025-03-27)

📚 Publications

• Encyclopedia of Han Dynasty Life series: Hanshu Pamphlets 1–10, Three Kingdoms Pocketbooks 1–6 (self-published)
  • Tumblbug Project (2019) — 807% of funding goal achieved
    • Hanshu Pamphlet 1: Self-Reference, Address, and Reference
    • Hanshu Pamphlet 2: Divination on Earth
    • Hanshu Pamphlet 3: Binding and Imprisonment
    • Hanshu Pamphlet 4: Chronicle of Beautiful Men
    • Hanshu Pamphlet 5: Did Huo Qubing Really Eat Grapes?
    • Hanshu Pamphlet 6 Special Edition: People Neglect Their Work But Always Eat at the Right Time [Purchase]
  • Tumblbug Project (2021) — 990% of funding goal achieved
    • Three Kingdoms Pocketbook 1: Guide to Terms of Address [Purchase]
    • Three Kingdoms Pocketbook 2: Abandoning Etiquette in Search of Food [Purchase]
  • Tumblbug Project (2022) — 686% of funding goal achieved
    • Three Kingdoms Pocketbook 3: Incense, Pioneering New Senses [Purchase]
    • Three Kingdoms Pocketbook 4: A Preliminary Discussion on the Revival of Corporal Punishment [Purchase]
  • Tumblbug Project (2023) — 853% of funding goal achieved
    • Hanshu Pamphlet 7 Special Edition: Carriages and Dress
    • Three Kingdoms Pocketbook 5: What Do Doctors and Musicians Have in Common? [Purchase]
  • Tumblbug Project (2024) — 378% of funding goal achieved
    • Three Kingdoms Pocketbook 6: Children’s Games and Songs [Purchase]
  • Tumblbug Project (2024) — 415% of funding goal achieved
    • Hanshu Pamphlet 8: Puppies and Foals
    • Hanshu Pamphlet 9: Swords
  • Tumblbug Project (2025) — 286% of funding goal achieved
    • Hanshu Pamphlet 10: Working Women
• Book review of Biographies from the Book of Han
  • Zya (2022), “The Orderly Tradition of East Asian Historical Writing,” in Croisée 3: Biography, From Life to Writing, Itta Press.

✉️ Contact

zya.han.writer _at_ gmail _dot_ com

💸 Purchase and Support

https://buymeacoffee.com/zya.han

(Last updated: November 11, 2025)