Han dynasty

• 1. Introduction

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  The Han dynasty gave its name to the people who make up the majority of modern China. They call themselves the Han people. Their spoken tongue is the Han language, and the script they write is made of Han characters. That naming runs deep, yet the dynasty itself began with a man of modest fief. The hegemon Xiang Yu appointed Liu Bang as prince of Hanzhong, a small territory beside the Han River in what is now southwest Shaanxi. The character Han also served as an ancient name for the Milky Way, the Sky River.

  Liu Bang held power from 202 BC, and the line he founded ran, with one violent interruption, until 220 AD. Later generations would look back on it as a golden age. But a golden age is not a smooth story. This was a dynasty broken in two by a usurper named Wang Mang, an empire that fought the nomads of the steppe for centuries, and a court that finally rotted from within as eunuchs and consort clans turned on one another. How did a prince of a minor fief become the founder of an enduring imperial idea? What did the Han build that outlasted them, and what brought four centuries of rule crashing down? Those questions wait in the chapters ahead.

• 2. Founding And Reunification

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  China's first imperial dynasty, the Qin, lasted from 221 to 206 BC and collapsed within four years of the death of its first emperor, Qin Shi Huang. In the rebellion that followed, China fissured into Eighteen Kingdoms, each pledging loyalty to one of two rebel leaders. Xiang Yu of Chu and Liu Bang of Han fought for hegemony over the whole.

  Xiang Yu proved an effective commander, but Liu Bang defeated him at the Battle of Gaixia in 202 BC, in what is now Anhui. At the urging of his followers, Liu Bang took the title of Emperor; he is known posthumously as Emperor Gaozu. He chose Chang'an, the modern Xi'an, as the capital of the reunified empire.

  Thirteen centrally controlled commanderies sat in the western third of the empire at the start of this period, while the eastern two-thirds were divided into ten semi-autonomous kingdoms. To placate the commanders who had fought beside him, Gaozu made some of them kings. He soon distrusted them. By 196 BC the court had replaced nearly all of these kings with members of the royal Liu family, leaving Changsha as the lone exception.

  The loyalty of those non-relatives was always in question, and Han kings staged repeated insurrections. The largest came in 154 BC, the Rebellion of the Seven States. In its wake the court began stripping the kingdoms of power, dividing their territories into commanderies under central control. By 145 BC kings could no longer appoint their own staff. The court took that duty, leaving kings as nominal heads who simply collected a share of tax revenue as personal income. The first nationwide census in Chinese history, taken in 2 AD, would register a population of 57,671,400 people across 12,366,470 households.

• 3. The Xiongnu Frontier

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  Modu Chanyu, chieftain of the nomadic Xiongnu, conquered the tribes of the eastern Eurasian Steppe. By the end of his reign he controlled Manchuria, Mongolia, and the Tarim Basin, subjugating more than twenty states east of Samarkand. When Emperor Gaozu imposed a trade embargo on iron weapons, the Xiongnu invaded what is now Shanxi and defeated Han forces at Baideng in 200 BC.

  The heqin agreement of 198 BC nominally held the Xiongnu and Han as equal partners in a royal marriage alliance. In practice the Han sent silk clothes, food, and wine as tribute, and Xiongnu raiders still struck south of the Great Wall for more. A court conference in 135 BC, assembled by Emperor Wu, voted to keep the heqin policy. The following year a fresh conference favored a different plan: lure and assassinate the Chanyu at Mayi to throw the Xiongnu into chaos.

  When that plot failed in 133 BC, Emperor Wu launched massive invasions into Xiongnu territory. The campaign reached its height in 119 BC at the Battle of Mobei, where commanders Huo Qubing and Wei Qing forced the Xiongnu court to flee north of the Gobi Desert. Han forces pushed as far north as Lake Baikal. In 121 BC they expelled the Xiongnu from a vast region running from the Hexi Corridor to Lop Nur, and in 111 BC they repelled a joint Xiongnu-Qiang invasion. That same year the court planted four frontier commanderies to hold the ground: Jiuquan, Zhangyi, Dunhuang, and Wuwei.

  The Xiongnu leader Huhanye finally submitted as a tributary vassal in 51 BC. His rival, Zhizhi Chanyu, was killed by Han forces under Chen Tang and Gan Yanshou at the Battle of Zhizhi, in modern Taraz, Kazakhstan. The lands north of the border would not stay quiet, though; they were later overrun by the nomadic Xianbei confederation.

• 4. Reaching The Wider World

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  Zhang Qian, a Han diplomat, traveled from 139 to 125 BC and made the first Chinese contacts with civilizations far to the west. He encountered Dayuan in Fergana, Kangju in Sogdiana, and Daxia in Bactria, the former Greco-Bactrian Kingdom. He gathered word of Shendu in the Indus River valley and Anxi, the Parthian Empire. All of these lands eventually received Han embassies.

  The oasis city-states of the Tarim Basin became the next prize. From about 115 BC to about 60 BC, Han forces fought the Xiongnu for them, and in 60 BC the court established the Protectorate of the Western Regions to handle the area's defense and foreign affairs. These connections opened the Silk Road, a trade network reaching all the way to the Roman Empire. Chinese silk moved west, and Roman glasswares moved east.

  Emperor Wu turned south as well. The naval conquest of Nanyue in 111 BC carried the Han realm into modern Guangdong, Guangxi, and northern Vietnam. The conquest of the Dian Kingdom in 109 BC brought in Yunnan. In 108 BC Han forces conquered Gojoseon on the Korean Peninsula and set up the Xuantu and Lelang commanderies.

  Foreign visitors flowed the other way during the Eastern Han. Buddhist monks arrived to translate works into Chinese, among them An Shigao from Parthia and Lokaksema from Kushan-era Gandhara. The Kushan ruler Vima Kadphises asked for a marriage alliance in AD 90; when it was refused, he sent troops to Wakhan in modern Afghanistan to attack the general Ban Chao, only to withdraw for lack of supplies. A group recorded as a Roman embassy of Marcus Aurelius reached the court of Emperor Huan in AD 166, though the historian Rafe de Crespigny argues these were most likely Roman merchants. Roman medallions from the reigns of Antoninus Pius and Marcus Aurelius have turned up at Óc Eo in Vietnam, a port that may be the Cattigara described by Ptolemy in his Geography.

• 5. The Usurper Wang Mang

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  Wang Zhengjun, who lived from 71 BC to 13 AD, rose through three titles in turn: empress, empress dowager, and grand empress dowager, across the reigns of Emperors Yuan, Cheng, and Ai. Through those years a string of her male relatives held the office of regent. After Emperor Ai died, her nephew Wang Mang, born in 45 BC, was made regent as Marshall of State on the 16th of August under the young Emperor Ping.

  When Emperor Ping died on the 3rd of February 6 AD, the child Ruzi Ying became heir, and Wang Mang served as acting emperor in his place. He promised to hand power back once the boy came of age. Instead, on the 10th of January, Wang Mang declared that the Mandate of Heaven had passed to him, ending the Han and beginning his own Xin dynasty, which lasted from 9 to 23 AD.

  Wang Mang's reforms outlawed slavery, sought to nationalize and redistribute land equally between households, and introduced new currencies that debased the value of coinage. His downfall came from the rivers. Massive floods around 3 AD and 11 AD struck after silt build-up raised the Yellow River and overwhelmed its flood control works. The river split into two new branches, one draining north and one south of the Shandong Peninsula. The floods drove thousands of peasant farmers from their land, and many joined roving rebel groups such as the Red Eyebrows.

• 6. Coins, Monopolies, And Taxes

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  The wuzhu coin, weighing 3.2 grams, became China's standard money after Emperor Wu introduced it in 119 BC, and it held that place until the Tang dynasty of 618 to 907. Its road there was uneven. Emperor Gaozu first closed the government mint in favor of private minting. His widow, Grand Empress Dowager Lü Zhi, abolished private minting in 186 BC, then issued a lighter bronze coin in 182 BC that drove widespread inflation. Relief came only in 175 BC, when Emperor Wen let private minters make coins of precisely 2.6 grams.

  The poll tax did much to spread coin cash through the economy. Adult men and women each owed 120 coins a year, minors owed 20, and merchants paid a higher rate of 240. That demand for cash forced the minting of over 28,000,000,000 coins between 118 BC and 5 AD, an average of 220,000,000 a year. In 113 BC the central government closed the commandery mints, whose coins were often of inferior quality, and monopolized coinage entirely.

  Emperor Wu nationalized the salt and iron industries in 117 BC, since a single salt or iron magnate could command funds rivaling the imperial treasury and a workforce numbering in the thousands. Many former industrialists became officials running the state monopolies. Liquor was nationalized in 98 BC, but that monopoly lasted only until 81 BC. By the Eastern Han these monopolies were repealed in favor of production by commandery and county administrations and private businessmen.

  The land tax ran the other direction over time. In 168 BC it was cut from one-fifteenth of a household's crop yield to one-thirtieth, and later to one-hundredth in the dynasty's final decades. Higher property taxes made up the lost revenue. The small landowner-cultivators who carried most of the tax base came under strain in the latter half of the Eastern Han, when many fell into debt and became tenants for wealthy landlords.

• 7. Invention And Engineering

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  Cai Lun, who lived from AD 50 to 121, is credited with inventing the standard papermaking process in 105. The oldest known Chinese hempen paper, though, dates to the 2nd century BC, and the oldest surviving piece with writing on it was found in the ruins of a Han watchtower abandoned in AD 110 in Inner Mongolia. Han science reached a level later matched only by the Song dynasty of 960 to 1279.

  The three-legged iron seed drill, invented by the 2nd century BC, let farmers plant in neat rows instead of scattering seed by hand. The heavy mouldboard iron plough needed just one man and two oxen, carried three ploughshares and a seed box, and could work roughly 45,730 square meters in a single day. The grain intendant Zhao Guo devised the alternating fields system during Emperor Wu's reign, switching the positions of furrows and ridges between growing seasons to guard crops from wind and drought.

  Mechanical ingenuity often survives only in stray writings, since the artisan-engineers left no detailed records and Confucian scholars looked down on such work. In 15 BC the poet Yang Xiong described the belt drive for a quilling machine. Around AD 180 the craftsman Ding Huan built a manually operated rotary fan for cooling palace rooms, used gimbals to support an incense burner, and invented the first known zoetrope lamp. The administrator Du Shi created a waterwheel-powered reciprocator that drove the bellows for iron smelting.

  Underground, miners dug shafts more than 100 meters deep to reach metal ores. Borehole drilling and derricks lifted brine to iron pans where it was distilled into salt, and the distillation furnaces burned natural gas piped to the surface through bamboo. Some of these boreholes may have reached a total depth of 600 meters.

• 8. Eunuchs And Collapse

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  Emperor Zhang's reign was later remembered by Eastern Han scholars as the high point of the dynastic house. What followed was a long descent into eunuch power and consort-clan bloodletting. In 92 AD, with the help of the eunuch Zheng Zhong, Emperor He placed Empress Dowager Dou under house arrest and stripped her clan, in revenge for her purge of his natural mother's family.

  Each reign deepened the pattern. Empress Dowager Deng Sui ruled as regent through a financial crisis and a Qiang rebellion that ran from 107 to 118 AD; after her death the eunuchs convinced Emperor An that her clan had plotted against him, and many were driven to suicide. The eunuch Sun Cheng overthrew Empress Dowager Yan to enthrone Emperor Shun. The regent Liang Ji was later forced to take his own life after Emperor Huan turned eunuchs against him. When eunuchs imprisoned the official Li Ying on a charge of treason, the Grand Commandant Dou Wu persuaded Huan to free him in 167 AD, but the emperor barred Li Ying from office for life, opening the Partisan Prohibitions.

  The Partisan Prohibitions were repealed during the Yellow Turban Rebellion and the Five Pecks of Rice Rebellion in 184 AD, when the court could not afford to push the gentry toward the rebels. These were two Taoist religious societies led by the faith healers Zhang Jue and Zhang Lu. Zhang Jue's rebellion spanned eight provinces and was annihilated within a year. Zhang Lu's, in what is now northern Sichuan and southern Shaanxi, held out until 215 AD. Many generals raised in the crisis never disbanded their militias.

  The final unraveling came at the capital. General-in-chief He Jin plotted with Yuan Shao to destroy the eunuchs, but they assassinated him on the 22nd of September 189. The Yuan brothers stormed Luoyang's palaces, and on the 25th of September about two thousand eunuchs were killed. Zhang Rang fled with the young emperor and his brother Liu Xie, then drowned himself in the Yellow River. General Dong Zhuo seized the boys and the capital, demoted Emperor Shao in favor of Liu Xie as Emperor Xian, and burned Luoyang to the ground before resettling the court at Chang'an in May 191 AD. Dong was killed by his adopted son Lü Bu in a plot hatched by Wang Yun.

  Cao Cao, who lived from 155 to 220 AD, persuaded Emperor Xian to move the capital to Xuchang in 196 AD. He broke Yuan Shao at the Battle of Guandu in 200 AD. After his own defeat at the naval Battle of Red Cliffs in 208 AD, China split into three spheres: Cao Cao in the north, Sun Quan in the south, and Liu Bei in the west. Cao Cao died in March 220 AD. By December his son Cao Pi had Emperor Xian surrender the throne to him, ending the Han and opening the age of the Three Kingdoms: Cao Wei, Eastern Wu, and Shu Han.