Why use 'piled-up earth supporting a banner for indicating official rank'?

by s5ng

1. Please show me drawings, illustrations of this usage?

2. I have difficulty imagining or picturing why Chinese officials used "piled-up earth supporting a banner for indicating official rank"?

By definition, "piled-up earth" is earthy, whose synonyms in English are bawdy, crude, lowbred. Obviously, any Chinese official would hate to be seen as "bawdy, crude, lowbred"! Thus why didn't Chinese officials use posher materiel to support their banner indicating their rank?

I scanned Christopher Seeley's The Complete Guide to Japanese Kanji (2nd edn 2006), pp. 518-9.

https://i.imgur.com/2226IBx.jpg

Steelcan909

Hey there,

Just to let you know, your question is fine, and we're letting it stand. However, you should be aware that questions framed as 'Why didn't X do Y' relatively often don't get an answer that meets our standards (in our experience as moderators). There are a few reasons for this. Firstly, it often can be difficult to prove the counterfactual: historians know much more about what happened than what might have happened. Secondly, 'why didn't X do Y' questions are sometimes phrased in an ahistorical way. It's worth remembering that people in the past couldn't see into the future, and they generally didn't have all the information we now have about their situations; things that look obvious now didn't necessarily look that way at the time.

If you end up not getting a response after a day or two, consider asking a new question focusing instead on why what happened did happen (rather than why what didn't happen didn't happen) - this kind of question is more likely to get a response in our experience. Hope this helps!