Discuss the values of the Imperial Court during the Qin and Han dynasties.

What will be an ideal response?

The first Emperor Qin Shihuangdi unified China and began the Great Wall and other building projects. These undertakings were made possible by the organizational skill of the administrative bureaucracy. The written language was standardized, a uniform coinage was introduced, a system of weights and measures was introduced, and the country was divided into the provinces that that have endured. To maintain control, however, the Qin suppressed free speech, persecuted scholars, burned Classical texts and otherwise exerted absolute power. This control was based on the writings of Han Feizi, who argued that human beings were inherently evil and innately selfish and that only the state could instill enough fear in the individual to elicit proper conduct.
The Han emperors installed Confucianism as the official state philosophy and established an academy to train civil servants. The Han honored scholars and the literary arts flourished. Yuefu songs were collected and women poets and scholars were common, although women did not enjoy great power in society. The Chinese traded their most exclusive commodity, silk. Poetry also advanced and originated as written works as opposed to the earlier oral traditions. The invention of paper enabled China to develop widespread literacy.