The Han Dynasty (206 BCE–220 CE)

The Han dynasty oversaw an unprecedented period of peace and prosperity. Although supporters of the Han dynasty boasted of the regime’s imperial uniqueness, in reality it owed much to its predecessor, the Qin state. Indeed, the Qin contributed vital elements of political unity and economic growth to its more powerful successor regime. (See Map 7.1.) Together, the Qin and Han created the political, social, economic, and cultural foundations that characterized imperial China thereafter.

A Crucial Forerunner: The Qin Dynasty (221–207 BCE)

Later Han historians and thinkers were very critical of the Qin dynasty, belittling its achievements and blaming its short existence on corruption and incompetence. Archaeological and textual discoveries of recent decades, however, have shown how biased, if not outright false, this picture is. Although the Qin dynasty lasted for only fourteen years, its achievements were considerable and were indeed critical to establishing the foundations of later dynastic powers in China. The Qin were but one of many militaristic regimes during the Warring States period (c. 403–221 BCE), though in many ways they were the most warlike. What enabled the Qin to prevail over rivals was their expansion southwestward from their base in the Wei Valley into the Sichuan region, a vast area twice the size of their home territory and remarkable for rich mineral resources and fertile soil. There, in the fourth century BCE, a full century before the Qin became all-powerful, their leaders used a dynamic merchant class and an expanding silk trade to spur economic growth. Their myriad public works turned the region into the rice bowl of China. By the time that King Zheng ascended the throne of the Qin state at the age of fourteen in 247 BCE, the Qin were prepared to defeat the remaining Warring States and unify an empire that covered roughly two-thirds of modern China. They did so between 230 and 221 BCE, ending one of the most violent periods in Chinese history and initiating a Qin dynasty.

Analyzing Global Developments

Great Empires Compared: The Han, the Roman, the Qing, and the British Empires after World War I

The Roman and Han Empires were the most powerful and extensive empires that the world had known at the time, and because of their grandeur and accomplishments, they remained part of the European and Chinese historical traditions. Even the British imperialists, who, as the following table demonstrates, ruled over much larger populations than the Romans and the Han Chinese, though with lesser military forces, often compared their empire to that of the Romans. The Qing Empire at its height at the end of the nineteenth century rivaled the British Empire in many respects and offers yet another useful point of comparison. The Roman and British Empires boasted in similar terms about their global reach. The British asserted that the sun never set on their empire, while Claudian, an orator born in Egypt in the fourth century CE, wrote that Rome was the city that “sprang from humble beginnings, has stretched to either pole, and from one small place extended its power so as to be co-terminus with the sun’s light” (Harper, p. 2).

Maximum Land Area
Roman Empire	2,000,000 square miles surrounding 970,000 square miles of the Mediterranean Sea
Han Empire	4,000,000 square miles, mainly land based
British Empire	1,800,000 square miles, largely seaborne
Qing Empire	3,500,000 square miles, largely land based
Total Population
Roman Empire	c. 60,000,000 (c. one-quarter of the world’s population)
Han Empire	c. 60,000,000 (c. one-quarter of the world’s population)
British Empire	460,000,000 (c. one-quarter of the world’s population)
Qing Empire	450,000,000 (c. one-quarter of the world’s population)
Size of the Military Forces
Roman Empire	400,000
Han Empire	1,000,000
British Empire	330,000
Qing Empire	1,000,000
Largest Cities
Roman Empire
Rome	1,100,000
Alexandria	500,000
Carthage	300,000
Athens	250,000
Antioch	150,000
Han Empire
Chang’an City	500,000
Luoyang City	400,000
British Empire in 1920
London	7,500,000
Calcutta	1,300,000
Bombay	1,200,000
Glasgow	1,100,000
Birmingham	900,000
Cairo	800,000
Qing Empire in 1910
Beijing	1,100,000
Guangzhou	780,000
Yangzhou	570,000
Shanghai	440,000

QUESTIONS FOR ANALYSIS

If you compare the modern-day British Empire with the empires of the Romans and the Han Chinese, what differences stand out in terms of land area and total population? How might you account for some of these differences?
Why might the Han Empire and the Qing Empire have had much larger armies than the Roman and British Empires?
What hypotheses might you offer about cities—in terms of size, location, and other factors—in early world history versus modern world history?

Sources: Tim Cornell and John Matthews, Atlas of the Roman World (New York: Checkmark Books, 1982); Kyle Harper, The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017); Ping-Ti Ho, Studies on the Population of China, 1368–1953 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959); Susan Naquin, Peking: Temples and City Life, 1400–1900 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000); Max Roser, Hannah Ritchie, and Esteban Ortiz-Ospina, “World Population Growth,” Our World in Data, 2020, https://ourworldindata.org/world-population-growth; Peter Turchin, Jonathan M. Adams, and Thomas D. Hall, “East-West Orientation of Historical Empires and Modern States,” Journal of World-Systems Research 12 (2006): 219–29; Greg Woolf, Rome: An Empire’s Story (New York: Oxford University Press, 2022).

MAP 7.1 | The Qin and Han Dynasties, 221 BCE–220 CE

The short-lived Qin (221–207 BCE) and the much longer-lasting Han (206 BCE–220 CE) dynasties consolidated much of East Asia into one large regional empire.

Based on the map, when and where did various phases of expansion take place from the Qin through the Han dynasty? What features shaped that expansion?
Where was the Great Wall located, and what was it defending against?
What impact did the pastoral Xiongnu have on the Han dynasty’s effort to consolidate a large territorial state?

Supported by able ministers and generals and a large conscripted army composed mainly of peasant farmers, as well as a system of taxation that financed all-out war, King Zheng assumed the mandate of heaven from the Zhou and unified the states into a centralized empire. Having accomplished this feat, he declared himself Shi Huangdi, or the first “August Emperor,” in 221 BCE. Zheng harkened back to China’s great mythical emperors of antiquity. Forgoing the title of king (wang), which had been used by leaders of the Zhou and Warring States, Zheng instead took the title of di, a word that had meant “ancestral ruler” for the Shang and Zhou, but which had also been used to refer to divine and semidivine figures. He further used the term huang, or “august,” which had previously been used only to describe divine forces. By deploying these concepts from traditional religion, Zheng immediately transformed himself in an unprecedented fashion (as Augustus, also a first emperor, was later to do in Rome) into an almost semidivine being. To further consolidate his power, he forced the defeated rulers and their families to move to Xianyang, the Qin capital—where, under his watchful eye, they would be unable to gather rebel armies.

ADMINISTRATION AND CONTROL Like Augustus (the first Roman emperor) and Napoleon (an emperor in the modern era), Shi Huangdi, the first August Emperor, killed and destroyed on an unprecedented scale, but also established very important instruments of administration and law on which subsequent imperial rule depended. He parceled out the territory of his massive state into thirty-six provinces, or commanderies (jun), which he subdivided into counties (xian). Each commandery had a civilian and a military governor answering to an imperial inspector. These reforms provided China with a centralized bureaucracy and a hereditary emperor that later dynasties, including the Han, inherited. Crucial to this administrative strategy was the requirement that regional and local officials answer directly to the emperor, and he could dismiss them at will. Moreover, he made sure that civilian governors did not serve in their home areas—a calculated move that prevented them from building up power for themselves.

By providing the basis for taxation and conscription, the new system ensured that all able-bodied males would serve in the army and work on public projects, building border walls, imperial roads, canals, and huge palaces in the capital. These practices imposed a social order that had been lacking. To further unify the varied systems surviving from the Warring States period, the Qin emperor established standard weights and measures as well as a standard currency. The Qin extended China’s boundaries in the northeast to the Korean Peninsula, in the south to present-day Vietnam, and in the west into central Asia. Li Si—the emperor whisperer who motivated Shi Huangdi to claim power in the incident described at the start of this chapter—subscribed to the Warring States principles of Legalism. This philosophy valued written law codes, administrative regulations, and inflexible punishments more highly than rituals and ethics (which the Confucians emphasized) or spontaneity and the natural order (which the Daoists stressed). Determined to bring order to a turbulent world, Li Si made sure that strict laws and regulations, as well as harsh punishments, were applied to everyone regardless of rank or wealth. Punishments included beheading, mutilation by cutting off a person’s nose or foot, tattooing, shaving off a person’s beard or hair, hard labor, and loss of office and rank. After registering people in groups of five and ten, officials made them all responsible for one another—and subject to punishment for any crime that any one of them might commit.

The Qin also improved communications systems. They constructed roads radiating out from their capital to all parts of the empire. These immense thoroughfares had lanes to accommodate vehicles, pedestrians, animals, and soldiers. Their thick embankments of soil bristled with reinforcing metal poles and pine trees to check erosion. Officials required vehicles to have a standard axle length so that all wheels would fit in the same dirt ruts. Still, the dust and stench were nearly unbearable as travelers journeyed along the hundreds of miles from local towns and villages to the capital and back. After several days of travel, merchants would be lucky if their wares and goods survived undamaged.

Just as crucial was the Qin effort to standardize writing. Banning regional variants in written characters, the Qin required scribes and ministers throughout the empire to adopt the “small seal script,” a revised form of writing that resembled the pictographic forms carved on ancient Shang oracle bones (see Chapter 3). Its simpler characters evolved into the less complicated style of bureaucratic writing known as “clerical script” that was prominent during the Han dynasty.

The Qin then used this standard type of writing to disseminate their vision of the state. Standardization also eliminated troublesome ideas that might disturb the new imperial unity. In 213 BCE, a Qin decree ordered officials to confiscate and burn all books in private possession, except for technical works on medicine, divination, and agriculture. In addition, the court prosecuted teachers who used outlawed classical books, including some Confucian works that troublemakers could cite to criticize the Qin regime. Education and learning were now under the exclusive control of state officials.

**Qin Coin.** After centuries of distinctive regional currencies, the Qin created this standardized bronze coin as part of their general unification policy.

**Small Seal Script.** Under the Qin, the “large seal script” of the Zhou dynasty was unified and simplified to produce a style of calligraphy still used today.

**Intellectual Censorship.** This seventeenth-century painting depicts the infamous “Burning of the Books and Burying of the Scholars” edict enacted by Shi Huangdi at the suggestion of his adviser, Li Si. Unfortunately, even the state-approved texts were destroyed a mere six years later, during the fall of the Qin dynasty and sack of the capital.

ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL CHANGES The agrarian empire of the Qin yielded wealth that the state could tax, and increased tax revenues meant more resources for imposing order. The government issued rules on working the fields, taxed farming households, and conscripted laborers to build irrigation systems and canals so that even more land could come under cultivation. Unlike the Greek city-states and the Roman Empire, which relied on enslaved laborers for many large-scale tasks in the city and first-generation plantations in the countryside, the Qin and the Han dynasties relied heavily on free farmers and conscripted the farmers’ able-bodied sons into the huge imperial armies. Free to work their own land and required to pay only a small portion of their crops in taxes, peasant families were the economic bedrock of the Chinese empire.

Agricultural surpluses fueled long-distance commerce—the source of even more wealth and revenues. A class of merchants turned China’s cities into dynamic regional market centers. Merchants peddled foodstuffs as well as weapons, metals, horses, dogs, hides, furs, silk, and salt—all produced in different regions and transported on the improved road system. Taxed both in transit and in the market at a higher rate than foodstuffs, these trade goods yielded even more revenue for the imperial government.

The Qin dynasty, although short-lived and much criticized by its successors, was fundamental in forging the bases for all subsequent imperial power in China. It reshaped both the agrarian and commercial worlds and encouraged the rapid monetization of the economy. Through the careful management of imperial ideals in local contexts, it created new identities. And it reshaped rural and remote regions by using forced and voluntary settlements. In many ways, the Qin established the parameters within which any subsequent dynasty attempting to rule “All under Heaven” (tianxia) had to operate.

NOMADS AND THE QIN ALONG THE NORTHERN FRONTIER The Qin dynasty grappled with the need to expand and defend their borders. After the Qin united the Warring States into an empire, they started looking beyond to the north and west, where they encountered nomadic warrior peoples—especially the proud Xiongnu (see Chapter 6), who dominated the steppes to the north and west of China.

Relations between nomadic peoples and the settled Chinese teetered in a precarious balance until 215 BCE, when the Qin Empire pushed north into the middle of the Yellow River basin, seizing pasturelands from the Xiongnu and opening the region up for settlement. Qin officials built roads into these areas and employed conscripts and criminals to create a massive defensive wall, the forerunner of the “Great Wall” constructed more than a millennium later. In 211 BCE, the Qin settled 30,000 colonists in the steppe lands of Inner Eurasia.

**Qin Archer and Crossbow.** This kneeling archer was discovered in the tomb of Shi Huangdi, along with the thousands of other bowmen, cavalrymen, and infantry that composed the massive terra-cotta army. Notice his breastplate; its overlapping plates would have enhanced maneuverability. The wooden bow he was holding has disintegrated, but a replica appears above. The bronze arrowhead and trigger mechanism in this reproduction were found with the terra-cotta army.

Despite its military power, the Qin dynasty collapsed quickly. Its rule weighed heavily on taxpayers, and its constant warfare consumed massive tax revenues and huge numbers of laborers. When desperate conscripted workers mutinied in 209 BCE, they found allies in descendants of Warring States nobles, local military leaders, and influential merchants. The rebels swept up thousands of supporters with their call to arms against the “tyrannical” Qin. Shortly after the First Emperor died in 210 BCE, even the educated elite joined former lords and regional vassals in revolt. The second Qin emperor committed suicide early in 207 BCE, and his weak successor surrendered to the leader of the Han forces later that year. The resurgent Xiongnu confederacy also reconquered their old pasturelands as the Qin dynasty fell. Once again, these more mobile indigenous pastoral nomadic groups on the Eurasian steppes to the north and west commanded spaces distant from imperial power that enabled them to assert a considerable independence of action.

Beginnings of the Western Han Dynasty

The civil war that followed the collapse of Qin rule opened the way for the formation of the Western Han dynasty. A commoner and former policeman named Liu Bang (r. 206–195 BCE) declared himself prince of his home area of Pei before he was exiled to the state of Han by a powerful adversary. In 202 BCE, Liu proclaimed himself the first Han dynasty emperor. Emphasizing his peasant origins, Liu demonstrated his initial disdain for intellectuals by urinating into the hat of a court scholar. But he quickly learned that power would be better served through good manners. Confucian scholars loyal to the Han soon were busy justifying Liu Bang’s victory by depicting his Qin predecessors as cruel dynasts and ruthless despots. The scholar Jia Yi (c. 200–168 BCE) rhetorically claimed that the Qin fell “because the ruler lacked moral values.” Under the cover of receiving the mandate of heaven, the Han portrayed the Qin as evil, yet at the same time they adopted the Qin’s bureaucratic system. In reality—as we can see from a cache of pre-imperial Qin penal codes and administrative ordinances, which were written around 230 BCE on some 1,000 bamboo slips—Qin laws were no crueler than those of the Han until the Confucian moralization of legal judgments (discussed shortly) took shape much later in the Han dynasty.

The first part of the Han dynasty is known as the Western (or Former) Han dynasty (206 BCE–9 CE). The Han brought economic prosperity and the expansion of empire. (See Map 7.2.) This was especially the case under Emperor Wu (r. 141–87 BCE), known also as Han Wudi, who presided over one of the longest and most eventful reigns in Chinese history. Though he was called the “Martial Emperor” because of the state’s many military campaigns, Emperor Wu rarely inspected his military units and never led them in battle. Claiming to follow the Daoist principle of wuwei (noninterference), Wu in fact used a stringent penal code to eliminate powerful officials who got in his way, often having them condemned and executed. In a single year, his court system prosecuted over a thousand such cases.

Han Power and Administration

Undergirding the Han Empire was the tight-knit alliance between the imperial family and the new elite—the scholar-gentry class—who shared a determination to impose order on the Chinese population. Although the first Han emperors had no choice but to compromise with the aristocratic groups who had helped overthrow the Qin, in time the Han created the most highly centralized bureaucracy in the world, far more centralized than that of the Roman Empire. No fewer than 23,500 individuals staffed the central and local governments. That structure became the source of the Han’s enduring power. As under the Qin, the bureaucracy touched everyone because all males had to register, pay taxes, and serve in the military.

Government schools that promoted the scholar ideal became fertile sources for recruiting local officials. In 136 BCE, Emperor Wu founded what became the Imperial University, a college for classical scholars that supplied the Han need for well-trained bureaucrats. By the second century CE, it boasted 30,000 students and faculty. Apart from studying the classics, Han scholars also were naturalists and inventors. They made important medical discoveries, dealing with rational diagnoses of the body’s functions and the role of wind and temperature in transmitting diseases. They also developed the magnetic compass and high-quality paper, which replaced silk, wood, and bamboo strips as media for communicating laws, ideas, rituals, and technical knowledge. Increasingly, local elites encouraged their sons to master the classics. This practice not only guaranteed a future entry into the ruling class but also planted the Confucian classics at the heart of the imperial state and society.

The Han court moved quickly to tighten its grip on regional administration. First it removed powerful princes, crushed rebellions, and took over the areas controlled by regional lords. According to arrangements instituted in 106 BCE by Emperor Wu, the empire consisted of thirteen provinces under imperial inspectors. As during the Qin dynasty, commanderies, each administered by a civilian and a military official, covered vast lands inhabited by countless ethnic groups totaling millions of people. These officials maintained political stability and ensured the efficient collection of taxes. However, given the immense numbers under their jurisdiction and the heavy duties they bore, in many respects the local administrative staff was inadequate to the tasks it faced.

MAP 7.2 | Pax Sinica: The Han Dynasty in the First Century BCE

Agriculture, commerce, and industry flourished in East Asia under Han rule.

According to the map, what were the main commodities in the Han dynasty, where were they located, and along what routes might they have moved to pass among the empire’s regions?
Locate the lines marking the commanderies into which Han territory was divided. What do you notice about their comparative size, resources, and other features?
What do you notice about the location of major trade centers and the areas of intensive agriculture?

Early Han legal materials that survive from a Zhangjiashan Tomb (c. 186 BCE) show quite clearly the evolution of law in Han China beyond the purely legalistic Qin code. The chief concern of the new Han legal thinking was that it must conform with the ideals of Confucian officials who were appointed to serve in local prefectures. This entailed pursuing order and harmony through the stipulation and regulation of interpersonal relationships. Once in power, Confucian officials increasingly opposed the Qin model for enumerating each subject’s obligations to the state. The Qin had enforced such obligations through clearly prescribed rewards and punishments. For Confucians, an effective law stipulated not just one’s political obligations but also one’s obligations to others, which were determined by the nature of their social or familial relationships.

CONFUCIAN IDEOLOGY AND LEGITIMATE RULE Confucian thought slowly became the ideological buttress of the Han Empire. Under Emperor Wu, the people’s welfare was deemed the essential purpose of legitimate rule. (See Global Themes and Sources: Primary Source 7.1.) By 50 BCE, The Analects, a collection of Confucius’s sayings, was widely disseminated, and three Confucian ideals reigned as the official doctrine of the Han Empire: honoring tradition, respecting the lessons of history, and acknowledging the emperor’s responsibility to heaven. Scholars used Confucius’s words to tutor the princes. By embracing such political ideals, the Han rulers established an empire based on the mandate of heaven and crafted a careful balance in which the officials provided a counterweight to the emperor’s autocratic strength. Of course, when the interests of the court and the bureaucracy clashed, the emperor’s will was paramount.

The Economy and the New Social Order

Part of the Han leaders’ genius was their ability to win the support of diverse social groups that had been fighting over local resources for centuries. The basis for their success was their ability to organize daily life, create a stable social order, promote economic growth, and foster a state-centered religion. One important element in promoting political and social stability was that the Han allowed surviving Qin aristocrats to reacquire some of their former power. The Han also urged enterprising peasants who had worked the nobles’ lands to become local leaders in the countryside. Successful merchants won permission to extend their influence in cities, and in local areas scholars found themselves in the role of masters when their lords were removed.

Out of a massive agrarian base flowed a steady stream of tax revenues and labor for military forces and public works. The Han court drew revenues from state-owned imperial lands, mining, and mints; tribute from outlying domains; household taxes on the nobility; and surplus grains from wealthy merchants. Emperor Wu established state monopolies in salt, iron, and wine to fund his expensive military campaigns. His policies promoted silk and iron production—especially iron weapons and everyday tools—and controlled profiteering through price controls. He also minted standardized copper coins and imposed stiff penalties for counterfeiting.

Han cities were laid out in an orderly grid. Bustling markets served as public areas. Carriages transported rich families up and down wide avenues (and they paid a lot for the privilege: keeping a horse required as much grain as a family of six would consume). Court palaces became forbidden inner cities, off-limits to all but those in the imperial lineage or the government. Monumental architecture in China announced the palaces and tombs of rulers.

**Model of a Han Watchtower.** Wealthy Han burials contained terra-cotta models of buildings—houses, animal pens, granaries—that would replicate one’s life in the afterlife. Shown here is a model of a multistory watchtower standing just over 3 feet tall, the details of which give insight into Han building techniques in the first to third centuries CE. Archers with crossbows stand guard on an upper balcony, while a figure stands in greeting at the front gate.

DOMESTIC LIFE Daily life in Han China included new luxuries for the elite and reinforced traditional ideas about gender. Wealthy families took pride in their several-story homes displaying richly carved crossbeams and rafters. They cushioned their floors with embroidered pillows, wool rugs, and mats. Fine embroideries hung as drapes, and screens in the rooms secured privacy. Families also sharply distinguished gender roles to increase the authority of the father figure. Women and children stayed cloistered in inner quarters, preserving the sense that the family patriarch’s role was to protect mothers, wives, and children from a harsh society.

**Han Entertainment.** Han entertainment included dancing girls (*left*), musicians (*middle*), and acrobats (*right*).

Nonetheless, some elite women, often literate, enjoyed respect as teachers and managers within the family while their husbands served as officials away from home. Ban Zhao, the younger sister of the historian Ban Gu (32–92 CE), was an exceptional woman whose talents reached outside the home. She became the first female Chinese historian and lived relatively unconstrained. After marrying a local resident, Cao Shishu, at the age of fourteen, she was called Madame Cao at court. Subsequently, she completed her elder brother’s History of the Former Han Dynasty when he was imprisoned and executed. In addition to completing the first full dynastic history in China, Ban Zhao wrote Lessons for Women, in which she described the status of elite women and presented the ideal woman in light of her virtue, her type of work, and the words she spoke and wrote. (See Global Themes and Sources: Primary Source 7.3.) The importance of women within the family was reflected in the women at court who as heiress “empresses” (first order of succession) wielded powers behind the throne, including the empresses Lü and Dou at the turn of the second century BCE. Women who were commoners led much less protected lives. Many worked at hard labor in the fields, and some joined troupes of entertainers to sing and dance for food at open markets.

Silk was abundant and available to all classes, though in winter only the rich wrapped themselves in furs while everyone else stayed warm in woolens and ferret skins. The rich also wore distinctive slippers inlaid with leather or lined with silk. No longer were wine and meat reserved only for festivals, leading critics to decry the debauches of the well-to-do. In the cooked-meat stalls of the markets, those who could afford them pushed and shoved to buy their piglets, dog cutlets, or chopped liver. These tasty foods came to the dinner tables of the wealthy on vessels fashioned with silver inlay or golden handles.

Entertainment for those who could afford it included performing animals, tiger fights, and foreign dancing girls. Some gambled, betting for high stakes at liubo, a board game that involved shaking bamboo sticks out of a cup. Live music was popular at private homes, and rich families kept their own orchestras, complete with bells and drums. Although events like these had occurred during the Zhou dynasty, they had marked only public ritual occasions.

SOCIAL HIERARCHY At the base of Han society was a free peasantry—farmers who owned and tilled their own land. The Han court upheld an agrarian ideal by honoring the peasants’ productive labors, while subjecting merchants to a range of controls (including regulations on luxury consumption) and belittling them for not doing physical labor. Confucians and Daoists supported this hierarchy. Confucians envisioned scholar-officials as working hard for the ruler to enhance a moral economy in which profiteering by greedy merchants would be minimal.

In reality, however, the first century of Han rule perpetuated powerful elites. At the apex were the imperial clan and nobles, followed, in order, by high-ranking officials and scholars, great merchants and manufacturers, and a regionally based class of local magnates. Below these elites, lesser clerks, medium and small landowners, free farmers, artisans, small merchants, poor tenant farmers, and hired laborers eked out a living. The more destitute were enslaved by the government and relied on the state for food and clothing. At the bottom was a thin layer of convicts and men and women who were privately enslaved.

Between 100 BCE and 200 CE, scholar-officials linked the imperial center with local society. At first, their political clout and prestige complemented the power of landlords and large clans, but over time their autonomy grew as they gained wealth by acquiring private property. Following the fall of the Han, they emerged as the dominant aristocratic clans.

In the long run, the imperial court’s struggle to limit the power of local lords and magnates failed. Rulers had to rely on local officials to enforce their rule, but those officials could rarely stand up to the powerful men they were supposed to be governing. And when central rule proved too onerous for local elites, they always had the option of rebelling. Local uprisings against the Han that began in 99 BCE forced the court to relax its measures and left landlords and local magnates as dominant powers in the provinces. Below these privileged groups, powerless agrarian groups turned to Daoist religious organizations that crystallized into potent cells of dissent.

RELIGION AND OMENS Under Emperor Wu, Confucianism took on religious overtones. One treatise portrayed Confucius not as a humble teacher but as an uncrowned monarch and even as a demigod and a giver of laws, which differed from the more sober portrait of Confucius in The Analects.

Although Confucians at court championed classical learning, many local communities practiced forms of a remarkably dynamic popular Chinese religion. Imperial cults, magic, and sorcery reinforced the court’s interest in astronomical omens—such as the appearance of a supernova, solar halos, meteors, and lunar and solar eclipses. Unpredictable celestial events, as well as earthquakes and famines, could be taken to mean that the emperor had lost the mandate of heaven. Powerful ministers exploited these occurrences to intimidate their ruler. People of high and low social position alike believed that witchcraft could manipulate natural events and interfere with the will of heaven. Religion in many forms, from philosophy to witchcraft, was an essential feature of Han society from the elite to the poorer classes.

Military Expansion and the Silk Roads

The Han military machine was effective at expanding the empire’s borders and enforcing stability around the borderlands. Peace was good for business, specifically for creating stable conditions that allowed the safe transit of goods over the Silk Roads. Emperor Wu did much to transform the military forces. Following the Qin precedent, he again made military service compulsory. The number of men under arms was stunning: some 100,000 crack troops in the Imperial Guard were stationed in the capital, and more than a million were in the standing army.

EXPANDING BORDERS Han forces were particularly active along the borders. During the reign of Emperor Wu, Han control extended from southeastern China to northern Vietnam. When pro-Han Koreans appealed for Han help against their rulers, Emperor Wu’s expeditionary force defeated the Korean king and four Han commanderies sprang up in northern Korea. Incursions into Sichuan and the southwestern border areas were less successful, as both mountainous terrain and malaria hampered the Han armies. Here the terrain, including rugged highlands and watery, marshy lowlands, favored the independence of the local non-Han peoples. Just as the Han saw the deadly diseases, poisonous plants, and predatory animals as dangerous, they regarded the indigenous peoples (sometimes threateningly tattooed) as “savage tribesmen” whom they would need the full power of the state to control. Especially in mountainous highland areas of Dian in the southwest, a mosaic of non-Han peoples remained recalcitrant to the penetration of the imperial state and its culture. Even when peoples like the Mimo and Dian adopted Han models, like writing, they often did so to assert their own traditions. Nevertheless, a commandery took root in southern Sichuan in 135 BCE, and soon it opened trading routes to Southeast Asia.

**Bronze Horsemen.** Two bronze horsemen, from the Later (Eastern) Han dynasty, circa second century CE, holding ji. Ji, which would later be called polearms in western warfare, allow combatants to strike a swinging blow with great force. These statues were excavated in 1969 in Gansu along the Silk Roads. Note the size and strength of these Ferghana horses from central Asia.

**The Jade Gate.** Through the Jade Gate, the most significant pass on the Silk Roads, foods, fruits, and religions of the “western regions” were introduced into central China during the Han dynasty. Chinese inventions, such as paper during the Later (Eastern) Han dynasty and then the compass and gunpowder, traveled in the opposite direction.

The Han’s most serious military threat continued to come from nomadic peoples in the north, especially the Xiongnu. The Han inherited from the Qin a symbiotic relationship with these proud, horse-riding nomads from outside the frontier’s defensive wall. Merchants of the Han Empire brought silk cloth and thread, bronze mirrors, and lacquerware to the nomadic chiefs, exchanging them for furs, horses, and cattle.

After humiliating defeats at the hands of the Xiongnu between 129 and 124 BCE, the Han under Emperor Wu successfully repelled several Xiongnu invasions around 120 BCE. In subsequent campaigns, Han forces penetrated deep into Xiongnu territory, reaching as far as the northern Mongolian steppe. Eventually, the Han armies split the Xiongnu tribes. The southern tribes surrendered, but the northern began long gradual moves westward, where they eventually threatened the eastern flank of the Roman Empire.

THE CHINESE PEACE AND THE SILK ROADS The retreat of the Xiongnu and other nomadic peoples introduced a glorious period of peace and prosperity. Now China achieved a Pax Sinica (“Chinese Peace,” 149–87 BCE). During this period, long-distance trade flourished, cities ballooned, standards of living rose, and the population surged. As a result of their military campaigns, Emperor Wu and his successors became monarchs enjoying tribute from distant subordinate states. Normally, the Han did not intervene in the domestic policy of such states unless they rebelled. The Han instead relied on trade and markets to incorporate outlying lands as prosperous satellite states within the tribute system. The Xiongnu nomads even became key middlemen in Silk Road trade.

When the Xiongnu were no longer a threat to the north, Emperor Wu expanded westward. By 100 BCE, he had extended the northern defensive wall from the Tian Shan Mountains to the Gobi Desert. Along the wall stood signal beacons for sending emergency messages, and its gates opened periodically for trading fairs. The westernmost gate was called the Jade Gate, after the jade from the Taklamakan Desert that passed through it. Wu also built garrison cities at oases to protect the trade routes; farthest west was Dunhuang, which later become a culturally diverse center of Buddhist thought and activity.

It was expensive to maintain a strong military force in such a remote and barren country, so Wu established military and farming settlements in the semidesert region. The state even encouraged soldiers to bring their families to settle on the frontier. As warfare in these territories was relatively infrequent, soldiers could spend time digging wells, building canals, and reclaiming wastelands. Soon after its military power expanded beyond the Jade Gate, the Han government set up a similar system of oases on the rim of the Taklamakan Desert. With irrigation, oasis agriculture attracted many more settlers. Traders now could find food for themselves and fodder for their animals as the Xiongnu fled westward. Trade routes passing through deserts and oases now were safer and more reliable than the steppe routes, which they gradually replaced. These new desert routes would flourish for another century, until fierce Tibetan tribes challenged the distant Han frontiers.

THE HAN EMPIRE AND DEFORESTATION The Han dynasty had a significant, if unintended, impact on the environment. As the Han peoples moved southward and later westward, they transformed the local ecology. Not only did they colonize or control the indigenous peoples whom they encountered, but they also drove elephants, rhinoceroses, and other animals into extinction. The farming communities cleared immense tracts of land of shrubs and forests to prepare for agriculture. The Han were especially fond of oak, pine, ash, and elm, and their artists celebrated them in paintings; farmers, however, saw forests as a challenge to their work. China’s grand environmental narrative has been the clearing of the old-growth forests that originally covered the greater part of the territory of China.

But trees prevent erosion, and one of the results of the massive deforestation campaigns during the Han period in the regions surrounding the Yellow River was massive runoffs of soil into the river. In fact, the Yellow River owes its name to the immense quantities of mud that it absorbed from surrounding farmlands. This sediment raised the level of the river above the surrounding plain in many places. In spite of villagers’ efforts to build levees along the river’s banks, severe flooding occurred, threatening crops, destroying villages, and even undermining the legitimacy of ruling dynasties. During most of the Han period, a break in the levees took place every sixteen years. The highest concentration of flooding was between 66 BCE and 34 CE, when severe floods occurred every nine years. As in many empires, the Han’s expansion was based on expanded agriculture and brisk trade, but expansion came at a major environmental price: deforestation, flooding, and the destruction of the habitats of many plants and animals.

**Yellow River Flooding.** The Yellow River, a dangerous and wild body of water, frequently flooded and, during high floods, cut out new channels. This photo from September 1919 shows workers preparing for flood conditions, a practice that went back several millennia.

The Later (Eastern) Han Dynasty

After Wang Mang’s fall, problems of social, political, and economic inequalities fatally weakened the power of the emperor and the court. As a result, the Later (or Eastern) Han dynasty (25–220 CE), with its capital at Luoyang on the North China plain, followed a hands-off economic policy, under which large landowners and merchants amassed more wealth and more property. Decentralizing the regime was also good for local business and long-distance trade, as the Silk Roads continued to flourish. Chinese silk became popular as far away as the Roman Empire. In return, China received glass, jade, horses, precious stones, tortoiseshells, and fabrics. (See Current Trends in World History: Han China, the Early Roman Empire, and the Silk Roads.)

By the second century CE, landed elites were enjoying the fruits of their success in manipulating the Later (Eastern) Han tax system. It granted them so many land and labor exemptions that the government never again firmly controlled its human and agricultural resources as Emperor Wu had. As the court focused on the new capital in Luoyang, local power fell into the hands of great aristocratic families, who acquired even more privately owned land and forced free peasants to become their rent-paying tenants.

Such prosperity bred greater social inequity—among large landholders, tenant farmers, and peasants working their small parcels—and a renewed source of turmoil. Simmering tensions between landholders and peasants boiled over in a full-scale rebellion in 184 CE. Popular religious groups championed new ideas among commoners and elites for whom the many-centuries-earlier Daoist sage Master Laozi, the voice of naturalness and spontaneity, was an exemplary model. Daoist masters challenged Confucian ritual conformity, and they advanced their ideas in the name of a divine order that would redeem all people, not just elites. Officials, along with other political outcasts, headed strong dissident groups and eventually formed local movements. Under their leadership, religious groups such as the Yellow Turbans—so called because they wrapped yellow scarves around their heads—championed Daoist upheaval across the empire. The Yellow Turbans drew on Daoist ideas to call for a just and ideal society. Their message received a warm welcome from a population that was increasingly hostile to Han rule.

Proclaiming the Daoist millenarian belief in a future “Great Peace,” the Yellow Turbans demanded fairer treatment by the Han state and equal distribution of all farmlands. As agrarian conditions got worse, a widespread famine ensued. It was a catastrophe that, in the rebels’ view, demonstrated the emperor’s loss of the mandate of heaven. While Han military forces were successful in quashing the rebellion, significant damage had been done to Han rule. The economy disintegrated when people refused to pay taxes and provide forced labor, and internal wars engulfed the dynasty. After the 180s CE, three competing states replaced the Han: the Wei in the northwest, the Shu in the southwest, and the Wu in the south. A unified empire would not return until three centuries later.

Shi Huangdi: Title taken by King Zheng in 221 BCE when he claimed the mandate of heaven and consolidated the Qin dynasty. He is known for his tight centralization of power, including standardizing weights, measures, and writing; constructing roads, canals, and the beginnings of the Great Wall; and preparing a massive tomb for himself filled with an army of terra-cotta warriors.
commanderies: The thirty-six provinces (jun) into which Shi Huangdi divided territories. Each commandery had a civil governor, a military governor, and an imperial inspector.
Wu, Emperor (r. 141–87 BCE): Also known as Emperor Han Wudi, or the “Martial Emperor”; the ruler of the Han dynasty for more than fifty years, during which he expanded the empire through his extensive military campaigns.
Imperial University: Institution founded in 136 BCE by Emperor Wu (Han Wudi) not only to train future bureaucrats in the Confucian classics but also to foster scientific advances in other fields.
Pax Sinica: Modern term (paralleling the term Pax Romana) for the “Chinese Peace” that lasted from 149 to 87 BCE, a period when agriculture and commerce flourished, fueling the expansion of cities and the growth of the population of Han China.