Thetranslation ofHan dynastygovernment titles into English varies within the academic community. This page is a reference to compare renderings of Chinese official titles by differentsinologists.

The first specialist reference for the English renderings of Chinese official titles was written in 1878 by a British legate to the Chinese government in Beijing,William Frederick Mayers. The most common terms used today in translation of official titles date back toHomer H. Dubs's translation of theBook of Han andBook of the Later Han from 1938 to 1955.

Dubs's translation lacked a published glossary of titles, but a list of titles used by Dubs was compiled byRafe de Crespigny and published in 1967. In the interim,Wang Yuquan (王毓銓) publishedAn Outline of the Central Government of the Former Han Dynasty in 1949. The next major systematising work onHan dynasty government wasThe Bureaucracy of Han Times written byHans Bielenstein in 1980, drawing upon Dubs's and de Crespigny's work as its major source of translation for titles.^[1]

In 1985,Charles Hucker completed hisDictionary of Official Titles of Imperial China, a collection of nearly 8,300 titles and government offices and associated translations for every dynasty from theZhou to theQing, the most complete specialist literature of its type. During the 1980s and 1990s another list of proposed translation forHan dynasty titles was circulating in theUniversity of Washington, whereJack Dull headed the Han Dynasty Project. Long after Dull's death, this list was made available as part of his collection of unpublished papers, available online fromUniversity of Oregon. Dull's list ofOfficial Titles of the Han Dynasty also mainly follows Dubs.

Two comprehensive biographical dictionaries have also added to these reference aids:Michael Loewe's 2000Biographical Dictionary of Qin, Former Han, and Xin Periods, and Rafe de Crespigny's 2007Biographical Dictionary of Later Han to the Three Kingdoms, both published by Brill and intended to complement each other. De Crespigny's translation of titles mainly follow Dubs with some alterations, whereas Loewe's tend to be his own original renderings.

In 2007 Rafe de Crespigny published online a collection of his papers, among themAn Outline of the Military Organisation of the Later Han Empire andAn Outline of the Civil Administration of the Later Han Empire. Each of these include an appendix listing a number of titles along with the translation de Crespigny has adopted, which he calls "slightly modified, varying from the system established by H.H. Dubs...".^[2]

The Dubs school of title translation has the longest pedigree of any schema for title translation and has broad acceptance in the scholarly community, but it was not built on any unifying principles^[3] and changed erratically during Dubs's lifetime.^[4] It is now mainly represented by the works of Bielenstein, de Crespigny, and Dull, all of whom made their own minor alterations while trying to remain mostly in the Dubs framework.

Wang Yuquan's 1949 article, although based entirely on primary source materials, seems to draw inspiration for translation of titles from Dubs in places,^[5] and can be considered to be completely superseded by later works. It was a source for Bielenstein, who called it "out of date".^[6] Bielenstein remains the academic standard which all others attempt to improve but compare themselves against for context. Dull's work, unpublished until it was released freely on the web in 2010, has been ignored by academia. De Crespigny has gone further outside the Dubs mold than the other authors.

In a 1971 review of de Crespigny's 1969 translation of part of theZizhi Tongjian, Han dynasty specialistAnthony Hulsewé impugned the renderings of Chinese official titles, which then much more closely followed Dubs, as "barbarized" and "abhorrent".^[7]

Hucker's system has, in the main, not been adopted by the scholarly community. Its strengths are that it was created with a goal of systematisation and universality, and built upon sound principles of translation: that the rendering should ideally convey both the sense of the responsibilities of the office and the literal Chinese meaning, that it should avoid too-familiar Western analogues likely to create false impressions, and that it should not rely on bizarre-sounding neologisms.^[8] Hucker drew from a great deal of references during his research, including the work of Bielenstein, and received input from a large number of Chinese scholars, including de Crespigny and Dull.^[9]

InAn Outline of the Civil Administration of the Later Han Empire, Rafe de Crespigny rejects outright Hucker's system, claiming he found Hucker's renderings to be unreliable and unacceptable for the Han period.^[10]

The titles adopted by Loewe in hisBiographical Dictionary largely follow the translations as they appeared inThe Cambridge History of China, volume 1 (1987), which Loewe helped to edit. He shies away from more literal translations, opting instead for renderings which "indicate an official's responsibilities, or his place in the organs of government, where possible in immediately meaningful terms; and in so far as imperial offices were organised in a hierarchical basis, it has been thought advisable to choose terms which convey an official's degree of seniority."^[11] Loewe appends a table comparing the renderings he adopts to those used by "Dubs, Bielenstein, and de Crespigny",^[12] acknowledging their grouping as a single school and that school's sinological primacy.

Several difficulties exist in providing a unified one-to-one translation for Han dynasty titles, these may range from each scholar's personal preferences to more profound issues.

One main point of contention is whether the translation should follow the literal meaning of the title or to describe the roles of that title's holder. As the Chinese bureaucracy developed, the responsibilities of an office changed and the names of positions changed, not necessarily at the same time. An office from theZhou dynasty might share the same title as an office from theQing dynasty, but with completely different powers, scope, and responsibilities.

Not every scholar covers every era. While Hucker's system is meant to detail government offices since the Zhou dynasty, the Dubs School focuses on the Han dynasty, and to a lesser extent theQin dynasty andThree Kingdoms period. De Crespigny is an expert on the Eastern Han dynasty and Three Kingdoms; Loewe is an expert on the Western Han andXin dynasties. A valid translation for one dynasty may not be valid for another.

Here is a table of comparisons between Han dynasty Chinese official titles and five sources of renderings, ordered by pinyin.

• Bielenstein, Hans (1980).The Bureaucracy of Han Times. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.ISBN 978-0-521-22510-6.
• de Crespigny, Rafe (1967).Official Titles of the Former Han Dynasty as Translated and Transcribed by H.H. Dubs. Canberra: Australian National University Press.
• de Crespigny, Rafe (2007).A Biographical Dictionary of Later Han to the Three Kingdoms (23 – 220 AD). Leiden: Brill.ISBN 978-90-04-15605-0.
• de Crespigny, Rafe (2007),An Outline of the Civil Administration of the Later Han Empire, Australia National University, archived fromthe original on September 3, 2007
• de Crespigny, Rafe (2007),An Outline of the Military Organisation of the Later Han Empire, Australia National University, archived fromthe original on September 3, 2007
• Dubs, Homer H. (1938).The History of the Former Han Dynasty. Baltimore: Waverly Press.
• Dull, Jack L. (2006),Official Titles of the Han Dynasty: A Tentative List(PDF), University of Washington, archived fromthe original(PDF) on July 1, 2018
• Hucker, Charles O. (1985).Dictionary of Official Titles of Imperial China. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
• Hulsewé, A.F.P. (1971). "review of Rafe de Crespigny'sThe Last of the Han, 1969".T'oung Pao.57 (1). Brill:168–171.
• Loewe, Michael (2000).A Biographical Dictionary of the Qin, Former Han, and Xin Periods (221 BC – AD 24). Leiden: Brill.ISBN 90-04-10364-3.
• Mayers, William Frederick (1878).The Chinese Government: A Manual of Chinese Titles. Shanghai: American Presbyterian Mission Press.
• Wang Yuquan (June 1949). "An outline of the central government of the Former Han Dynasty".Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies.12 (1/2). Harvard–Yenching Institute:134–187.doi:10.2307/2718206.JSTOR 2718206.

• Chinese-language titles
• Government of Imperial China
• Government of the Han dynasty
• Sinology
• Translations into English

• Articles with short description
• Short description matches Wikidata