The Individual and the State: Stories of Assassins in Early Imperial China

Abstract

In my thesis I try to give a new reading about the stories of assassins in the Han dynasty. I relate the assassins’ figures to Han scholar’s thoughts and read these stories as a kind of new relationship between the individual and the state. My research includes the translations of all the Chinese texts I used – many of them are not translated before, and my readings about these texts. By analyzing these stories, we may get the point that assassins shown as a category emerged during the early empires and this emerging category reflect a new conception of an individual’s role in history, namely that any given individual can have influence over the fate of the empire.