Han dynasty

The Han dynasty (汉朝) grew out of the collapse of the Qin. Liu Bang (刘邦), a man of peasant origin, was one of the leaders of the revolt against Qin rule. After the Qin fell, the hegemon Xiang Yu made him king of Han in 206 BCE, after his fief of Hanzhong, which was named after the Han River. A four-year struggle between the two men followed, known as the Chu–Han Contention. In 202 BCE Xiang Yu's forces were overwhelmed and he took his own life rather than be captured; Liu Bang then took the title of emperor. He is best known by his temple name, Gaozu.

Hence the two start dates found in reference works: 206 BCE if you count from Liu Bang's title of king of Han, 202 BCE if you count from his proclamation as emperor.

The capital was soon set at Chang'an, near present-day Xi'an. The dynasty ruled for more than four centuries, with a break in the middle. Wang Mang (王莽), named acting emperor in 6 CE, took the throne himself in 9 CE and founded his own dynasty, the Xin (新). His reign was struck by disaster: the Yellow River changed course twice, bringing famine, epidemics and unrest. In 23 CE rebels stormed Chang'an and Wang Mang was killed. In 25 CE Liu Xiu (刘秀), known as Emperor Guangwu, restored the Han and made Luoyang his capital, as Chang'an had been all but destroyed. Historians therefore distinguish the Western Han (西汉), who ruled from Chang'an, and the Eastern Han (东汉), who ruled from Luoyang.

The character 汉 (hàn) was first the name of a river, the Han (汉水); in the old language it also named the Milky Way, the "river of the sky". The fief of Hanzhong took its name from the river, and the dynasty took its name from the fief.

Before the Han, in the Warring States period, the people of the Central Plain called themselves Huaxia (华夏), a name that set their culture apart from the peoples on the periphery. The dynasty changed that. As Britannica puts it, the Han established what was thereafter considered Chinese culture so thoroughly that "Han" became the Chinese word for someone who is ethnically Chinese.

The ethnic sense grew during the centuries of division that followed. When peoples from the steppe, notably the Xianbei who founded the Northern Wei, ruled northern China, the native population came to be called Hanren (汉人), "the people of Han", to set it apart from the newcomers.

That is where three words every learner meets early on come from: 汉族 (Hànzú), the Han people, China's majority ethnic group; 汉语 (Hànyǔ), the Chinese language; and 汉字 (Hànzì), Chinese characters. These names formed after the dynasty, built on its name; 汉语 and 汉字 are HSK 1 vocabulary.

According to Britannica, Emperor Wu (汉武帝), who reigned from 141 to 87 BCE, vastly increased the authority of the Han. From 133 BCE he made war on the Xiongnu (匈奴), the nomads who were then the main threat on the northern frontier, sending generals such as Wei Qing and Huo Qubing against them. The empire also grew southwards: the kingdom of Nanyue (Nam Viet) was conquered in 111 BCE, northern and central Vietnam were brought into the empire, and Han rule reached Korea too. To pay for these wars the state raised new taxes and set up monopolies on salt, iron and wine; the salt and iron agencies date from about 117 BCE.

Wu is also known for making Confucianism the state orthodoxy. In 136 BCE he abolished the scholarly chairs that did not deal with the Five Classics, and the scholar Dong Zhongshu (董仲舒) argued for Confucian teaching as the unifying ideology of the empire. In 124 BCE an Imperial Academy (太学, Taixue) was founded to train future officials in the Confucian texts; Britannica calls it the forerunner of the later civil service examinations.

Historians now qualify this "victory of Confucianism". Michael Loewe, among others, has questioned how far it went: Wu's government pursued goals associated with Legalism (filling the treasury, centralizing power, exalting the emperor) while speaking the language of Confucianism. That combination remained the structure of imperial government for two thousand years.

In 139 BCE (138 according to other sources) Emperor Wu sent Zhang Qian (张骞) west, into what the Chinese called the Western Regions (西域), to seek an alliance with the Yuezhi against the Xiongnu. On the way he was captured by the Xiongnu and held for about ten years; he married there and had a son. He eventually escaped and reached the Yuezhi, by then settled in Transoxiana, but they no longer wanted to return east. He came home after an absence of some thirteen years.

As diplomacy, the mission failed. But Zhang Qian also sent assistants to the Fergana Valley, Bactria and Sogdiana, and his mission led to the introduction into China of a superior breed of horse and of new plants such as grapes and alfalfa. On his travels he came across a series of trade routes skirting the Taklamakan Desert. They are now known collectively as the Silk Road, because Chinese silk was a major and valuable product traded along them. His journeys opened the long history of relations between China and Central Asia.

The name itself is modern. For most of their history these routes had no particular name. The German geologist Ferdinand von Richthofen popularized the term Seidenstraße ("silk road") in 1877; other German scholars had written about the routes before him, and the term only won wide acceptance in the 20th century.

The Shiji (史记), or Records of the Grand Historian, was written under the Han. The project was conceived by Sima Tan (司马谈), a court historian; his son Sima Qian (司马迁) inherited both his post and the task of completing it.

In 99 BCE Sima Qian was the only man at court to speak up for Li Ling, a general blamed for a failed campaign against the Xiongnu. Charged with "defaming the emperor", he was sentenced to death. At the time an execution could be commuted either by a payment or by castration; too poor to buy his way out, he chose castration so that he could finish his history. He did finish it.

The result, eighteen years in the making, runs to 130 chapters and more than 520,000 characters, covering more than 2,000 years from the Yellow Emperor to the author's own day. It is organized in five parts: basic annals, tables, treatises, hereditary houses and biographies. Sources differ on when it was completed: before 91 BCE, probably around 94 BCE, for some; around 85 BCE for Britannica.

It was the first general history of its kind in China, and its structure became the pattern for the official histories of later dynasties. That is why Sima Qian is often called the father of Chinese historiography.

Tradition credits the invention of paper to Cai Lun (蔡伦), a eunuch who entered palace service around 75 CE and became chief eunuch when Emperor He came to the throne in 88. In 105 CE he presented the emperor with sheets made from tree bark, hemp waste, old rags and fishnets: a material better to write on than silk, and cheaper. The emperor praised him, and this paper became known as "Marquis Cai's paper" (蔡侯纸). The episode is told in the Book of the Later Han (后汉书), written centuries after the event.

Archaeology has pushed the date back. In 1986 Chinese archaeologists announced finds from Fangmatan, in Gansu province, including a fragment of hemp paper, 5.6 by 2.6 cm, bearing part of a map. It comes from a tomb of the early Western Han and is dated to 179–141 BCE, more than two centuries before Cai Lun. So neither the exact date nor the inventor of paper can be pinned down: Cai Lun's contribution was an improvement rather than an invention. By using cheap waste materials, his method lowered the cost of paper and helped it spread.

Britannica dates the decline from the reign of Emperor He (88–105/106), when the court fell under the sway of the empresses' families and the eunuchs, while great landowning families grew stronger in the countryside. Of the nine rulers who came to the throne in the following century, the oldest was 14.

In 184 CE the Yellow Turban Rebellion (黄巾) broke out in the east. Its leader, Zhang Jue, a Daoist faith healer who had won many followers during an epidemic, proclaimed that the "blue heaven" would be replaced by a "yellow heaven", and his followers wore yellow turbans as a sign of that hope. The movement was aimed at the eunuchs who dominated the emperor. The unrest lasted until about 204 and helped bring the dynasty down.

In 189 the feud between the consort families and the eunuchs ended in a massacre of the eunuchs, and power passed to warlords such as Dong Zhuo and Cao Cao (曹操). By 207 Cao Cao controlled the north, but his defeat by Sun Quan at the Battle of Red Cliffs kept him from reuniting the country. In 220 his son Cao Pi (曹丕) obtained the abdication of the last Han emperor, Xian, and founded the Wei dynasty. Liu Bei proclaimed Shu Han in 221 and Sun Quan founded Wu in 222: the Three Kingdoms period had begun, lasting until reunification under the Jin in 280.