纪录片《大英博物馆世界简史》 034中国汉族漆杯(3)（在线收听）

High-quality lacquer was brilliantly smooth and virtually indestructible. Fine pieces like our cup required up to 30 or more separate coats, with long drying and hardening times between each, and so it could have taken up to about a month to make. Hardly surprising, then, that they were inordinately expensive-you could buy more than ten bronze cups for the price of one in lacquer-so lacquer cups were strictly reserved for top management, the Imperial governors controlling the frontiers of the Empire. Although the Han Chinese and the Roman empires covered roughly the same land area, a census conducted in China, only two years before our cup was made, came up with the wonderfully precise figure of a population of 57,671,400 individuals. Here's Roel Sterckx again:

高级漆器的表面十分光滑，同时又非常坚固。如本文中的耳杯这样的精品漆器需要涂抹三十多层漆。每抹完一次便需耐心等待它干燥变硬， 因此制作周期需要一个月之久。毫不奇怪，它的价格十分昂贵，一只漆杯的价格相当于十只青铜杯，因此仅限驻守边疆的将领等位高权重的人使用。汉朝的领土与罗马帝国大致相当，但人口更多。漆杯制作前两年的一次人口普查得到了五千七百六十七万一千四百人的精确数字。胡司德说：

"One of things we need to keep in mind, of course, is that the Chinese Empire is immense, and that it straddles a hugely diverse geographic region. And in the case of the Han, we're talking about a distance that stretches from North Korea to Vietnam. Contact between people is obviously not always very obvious, and so the circulation of goods, the circulation of imperially sanctioned objects, together of course with texts, is part of that symbolical assertion of what it means to be an empire. You might not see people who are part of the same empire, but you might actually-by witnessing the goods that are produced across the empire-feel, or have a sense of belonging to, that greater imagined community in many ways."

我们必须了解，中国幅员辽阔，人口众多。汉朝的领土从朝鲜一直延伸到越南。但民众间的交流并不频繁，因此商品的流通、皇室专用物品的流通以及统一的文字，便成为帝国统一性的象征。你也许无法同帝国其他部分的百姓碰面，但各地产物的流通能让你找到身属一个庞大帝国的认同感。