Hello redditors! I have a question that Im desperately hoping someone may have some knowledge on. I am doing a research project for school over the chinese Han Dynasty. For my project I need 2 primary (first hand account) sources and 2 secondary sources. I have found one that I think works as a Primary, called "The Classic of Filial Piety (Xiaojing)", but I need help finding more. I have scouted the internet searching and keep coming up dry. Thank you so much for any help you may have I greatly appreciate it!
The biggest challenge here is just finding primary materials that have decent English translations. You might be best served by looking for a sourcebook (something like Patricia Buckley Ebrey's Chinese Civilization: A Sourcebook) and work from what is included there. Most of the major philosophical works that can be easily found in English- the Analects, the Dao De Jing, etc- are pre-Han in origin, although they were very widely read during Han times. The Classic of Filial Piety probably also dates to the Warring States period though it was a common educational text under the Han dynasty.
Some good Han primary sources you could consider looking for include Sima Qian's Records of the Grand Historian or Shiji 史记, Ban Gu's Book of Han or Hanshu 汉书, the Discourses on Salt and Iron or Yantielun 盐铁论, and Liu Xiang's Biographies of Exemplary Women or Lienüzhuan 烈女传. All of these have been either fully or partly translated into English and cover a diverse range of social, political, ethical and economic materials.
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I think for a secondary source that William Theodore de Bary's book Sources of East Asian Tradition, Volume 1 is a quality source for the information that you are looking for. He also has books that go by the name Sources of Chinese Tradition which are probably just as helpful.
WRT secondary materials, for a school project the Cambridge History of China Volume 1 should prove useful, as it will contain perspectives from a variety of historians on various aspects – some chronological and some theematic. Mark Edward Lewis' The Early Chinese Empires: Qin and Han, published as part of Timothy Brook's History of Imperial China series, will be a similarly useful overview, and probably a much more concise one.