The Han Dynasty

The Qin dynasty unified China in 221 BC but collapsed soon after the death of the First Emperor in 210 BC. Years of rebellion and civil war followed.

Liu Bang, a minor official of humble birth, emerged as the winner. He took the title King of Han in 206 BC, the date traditionally given for the start of the dynasty, and declared himself emperor in 202 BC after defeating his rival Xiang Yu. He is known to history as Emperor Gaozu.

Gaozu kept much of the Qin administrative system but softened its harsh laws. He built his capital at Chang'an, close to modern Xi'an in Shaanxi province, which grew into one of the largest cities of its time.

Historians divide the dynasty into two halves: the Western (or Former) Han, 206 BC to AD 9, ruled from Chang'an, and the Eastern (or Later) Han, AD 25 to 220, ruled from Luoyang.

After Gaozu died in 195 BC, real power passed to his widow, Empress Lü, who dominated the court until her death in 180 BC. Her successors, Emperor Wen and Emperor Jing, lowered taxes, encouraged farming and kept government spending modest. The treasury and granaries filled.

That surplus paid for the long and ambitious reign of Emperor Wu (141–87 BC). His generals Wei Qing and Huo Qubing drove the nomadic Xiongnu back from the northern frontier, and Han control reached into the Gansu corridor, Korea and the far south.

Wu also changed how the state was run. He favoured scholars trained in the Confucian classics, founded an imperial academy in 124 BC to teach them, and drew officials increasingly from its graduates. To pay for his wars he made salt and iron state monopolies, a policy that was fiercely debated at court after his death.

In the later Western Han, weak emperors and powerful consort families steadily eroded the throne's authority. In AD 9 Wang Mang, a regent for a child ruler, took the throne himself and declared a new dynasty, the Xin.

His reforms, including the nationalisation of land, were unpopular and poorly carried out, and a disastrous shift in the course of the Yellow River added famine to unrest. Peasant uprisings spread, among them the Red Eyebrows, and in AD 23 rebel forces took Chang'an and killed him.

Liu Xiu, a member of the Han imperial clan, restored the dynasty in AD 25 and ruled as Emperor Guangwu from a new capital at Luoyang. The early Eastern Han, under Guangwu and his successors Ming and Zhang, was stable and prosperous.

Du Shi, governor of Nanyang, is credited with water-powered bellows for iron smelting in AD 31, and the court in Luoyang presided over a busy commercial capital.

In about 138 BC Emperor Wu sent an envoy, Zhang Qian, west to seek allies against the Xiongnu. Zhang was captured by the Xiongnu and held for about ten years, but escaped and reached Bactria, in present-day northern Afghanistan.

There he was surprised to find cloth and bamboo from southwest China, which merchants said had come by way of India. When he finally returned to the court, some thirteen years after setting out, his reports of the kingdoms of Central Asia changed how the Han saw the world.

Han armies and garrisons followed, and the routes through the Gansu corridor and the oasis towns of the Tarim Basin became a regular channel for trade. Chinese silk travelled west, eventually reaching the Roman world through many intermediaries, while horses, glass, new crops and, in time, Buddhism came east.

Sima Qian's Records of the Grand Historian, completed around 90 BC, told China's story from legendary times to his own day in 130 chapters and became the model for all later official histories.

Much Confucian literature had been lost under the Qin. Scholars such as Fu Sheng, who preserved the Book of Documents, helped recover it, and by the second century AD the imperial academy is said to have had some 30,000 students.

Around AD 100 Xu Shen compiled the Shuowen Jiezi, the first Chinese dictionary to analyse characters by their components. In AD 105 the court official Cai Lun presented an improved method of making paper from bark, hemp and rags. Paper already existed, but his process helped it replace bamboo slips and silk for writing.

Zhang Heng built a bronze seismoscope in AD 132 that indicated the direction of distant earthquakes, and tradition credits the physician Hua Tuo with using an anaesthetic in surgery. The court Music Bureau, the Yuefu, collected songs and ballads that shaped Chinese poetry for centuries.

Most Han objects that reach the market were made for tombs. The Han believed the dead needed the comforts of life, so graves were furnished with pottery models of houses, granaries, watchtowers, wells, farm animals and attendants.

Many of these are earthenware covered in a low-fired lead glaze, coloured green with copper or amber-brown with iron. Centuries of burial often turn the green glaze a silvery, iridescent colour as its surface breaks down. Other figures are unglazed grey pottery with painted details, much of which has flaked away.

Han potters also made high-fired stoneware with a thin greenish glaze, especially in Zhejiang. By the late Eastern Han these kilns were producing an early celadon, an important step towards later Chinese porcelain, although true porcelain came much later.

Bronze casting remained a high art. Collectors know Han bronze mirrors, often with geometric "TLV" designs on the back, hill-shaped incense burners and elegant lamps. Jade was prized for its link with immortality: bi discs, cicada-shaped amulets and, for the highest nobility, full burial suits of jade plaques sewn with gold wire.

Han pottery and jade have been copied on a large scale. Dating rests on form, glaze, body and decoration compared with excavated examples, and for earthenware a thermoluminescence test is widely used. You can read more in our guides to identifying antique Chinese porcelain and antique Chinese jade.

From the late first century AD a series of child emperors came to the throne. Power moved between the families of empresses and the palace eunuchs, and factional struggles at court left the provinces poorly governed.

In 184 the Yellow Turban rebellion broke out, led by Zhang Jue, a Daoist faith healer who promised a new age. It was put down, but the generals who defeated it became warlords in their own right. In 189 the general Dong Zhuo seized Luoyang and installed the young Emperor Xian as a figurehead.

Emperor Xian later came under the control of Cao Cao, the most successful of the northern warlords. In 220, after Cao Cao's death, his son Cao Pi forced the emperor to abdicate and founded the state of Wei. China entered the Three Kingdoms period and nearly four centuries of division described on our Six Dynasties page.

The Han left a deep mark. The majority of Chinese still call themselves the Han people, and the Chinese script is still called hanzi, "Han characters".