In 221 BCE, King Ying Zheng of Qin conquered the rival warring states and established the Qin empire as Qin Shi Huangdi (The First August Emperor of Qin). The Qin emperor centralized state administration, built an extensive road network, and built the first Great Wall.
While the Qin dynasty collapsed in 207 BCE, China was reunified by Liu Bang, the founder of the Han Dynasty. During four centuries of Han rule, China expanded its frontiers in all directions and established trade links with the Roman Empire.
The Unification of China
During the 3rd century BCE, the kingdom of Qin emerged as the most powerful of the warring states in China. While the rulers of the warring states had been satisfied with pursuing their power struggles while paying nominal fealty to the king of Zhou, Qin armies invaded Zhou in the 250s BCE. They occupied the Eastern Zhou capital of Luoyang in 249.
In 246 BCE, King Ying Zheng of Qin came to the throne at the age of 13. After gaining control of the government in 238, the young king prepared to attack the rival warring states. Intimidated by Qin power, the kingdom of Han surrendered in 230. King Zheng then ordered his general Wang Jian to invade Zhao, and by 228 BCE, Qin forces occupied the Zhao capital of Handan.
By 226 BCE, Wang Jian’s forces were on the borders of the Kingdom of Yan in the northeast. After being subject to a failed assassination attempt planned by the Crown Prince of Yan, King Zheng reinforced Wang Jian, who occupied the Yan capital and restricted Yan to Liaodong near Korea. The following year, Wang Jian’s son Wang Ben conquered Wei by diverting the course of the Yellow River and flooding the Wei capital.
In 224 BCE, Wang Jian took command of 600,000 men and invaded the vast kingdom of Chu, leading a methodical campaign which led to the defeat of the Chu armies in 223. The following year, Wang Ben eliminated the remnants of the Yan state, and in 221, he conquered Qi, the last surviving warring state.
The Qin Empire
Following the unification of China, King Zheng adopted the title of Qin Shi Huangdi, or First August Emperor of Qin, thus establishing the Qin dynasty. During his campaigns of conquest, the First Emperor had already begun ordering his subordinates to build roads to join up his enlarged realm, both to encourage trade and to facilitate the movement of armies.
The emperor entrusted two major infrastructure projects to General Meng Tian, whom he sent to confront nomadic Xiongnu raiders to the north. After conquering the Ordos Loop, Meng Tian built what the ancient Chinese historian Sima Qian called “The Great Wall of 10,000 li.” Although the wall was made out of rammed earth and Meng Tian could use sections of wall built by Zhao and Yan during the warring states period, this remained a monumental achievement. To facilitate the movement of men and supplies, Meng Tian built a highway connecting the Qin capital of Xianyang to the frontier, one of many major roads built during the Qin dynasty.
The kingdom of Qin had been able to mobilize the resources to conquer China by having a centralized system of administration, and the First Emperor extended this to the empire by dividing it into commanderies governed by an official appointed by the central government. A major influence on the First Emperor’s domestic policies was his chancellor Li Si, a Legalist statesman who also led efforts to standardize the Chinese script. While Chinese people continued to speak with different dialects, the reform enabled them to read and understand written text throughout the empire.
The Fall of the Qin
The First Emperor has a reputation for ruling China with an iron fist, though this is partially due to the influence of Confucian scholar-officials who opposed Qin Legalist policies. When the First Emperor died in 210 BCE, the eunuch Zhao Gao issued false edicts accusing the emperor’s eldest son, Crown Prince Fusu, of treason. The emperor’s youngest son, the teenage Huhai, was instead installed as Qin Er Shi (The Second Qin Emperor).
The young Second Emperor lacked his father’s authority and was controlled by Zhao Gao. As central authority diminished, in August 209 BCE, a military officer named Chen She gathered a rebel army that marched on Xianyang. However, it was defeated by the Qin general Zhang Han, who mobilized the peasant conscripts working on the First Emperor’s Mausoleum and armed them with weapons that had been used to equip the Terracotta Warriors.
Although Chen She was killed by his own supporters in January 208 BCE, his example inspired further rebellions throughout the empire, which saw the revival of several warring states. The most successful was the Chu general Xiang Yu, who defeated Zhang Han at the Battle of Julu in 207 BCE. When the Second Emperor blamed Zhao Gao for the military defeat, the latter removed the emperor and replaced him with Prince Ziying, who was given the lesser title of king. Ziying was not prepared to be a puppet and put Zhao Gao to death, but surrendered to Xiang Yu’s subordinate Liu Bang in late 207 BCE, marking the end of the Qin dynasty.
The Han Dynasty
In 206 BCE, Xiang Yu established himself as Protector-King of Western Chu, supported by more than a dozen subordinate kings. He was soon challenged by Liu Bang, King of Han, who had been promised the kingship of the Qin heartland of Guanzhong. The Han armies conquered northern and eastern China and, in the winter of 203-202 BCE, defeated Xiang Yu, who fell at the Battle of Gaixia.
After defeating Xiang Yu, Liu Bang resurrected the imperial concept, proclaimed the foundation of the Han Dynasty, and came to be known as Emperor Gaozu of Han. After establishing his new capital at Chang’an near Xianyang, he introduced a hybrid administrative system, re-establishing Qin-style commanderies in the western half of the empire while appointing family members and key subordinates as the rulers of kingdoms in eastern China.
While Gaozu died in 195 BCE after less than a decade on the throne, his successors consolidated the dynasty’s hold over the imperial throne by gradually reducing the power of the subordinate kingdoms and dividing them into smaller entities, all while increasing the number and territorial extent of the commanderies. The subordinate kings who were not from the Liu family were removed and replaced by imperial princes.
The Han-Xiongnu Wars
The collapse of the Qin empire encouraged a resurgence among the Xiongnu led by Modu Chanyu, who united the Xiongnu tribes and reoccupied the Ordos Loop. In 200 BCE, Gaozu personally led a campaign to retake the Ordos but was trapped by the Xiongnu army and was obliged to pay a large tribute to regain his freedom. To prevent further incursions, Gaozu agreed to send an annual tribute to the Xiongnu leader together with an imperial princess to the Xiongnu court.
While the Han emperors would rarely send one of their own daughters to the Xiongnu, this heqin (peace marriage) policy remained a humiliation for the Han dynasty. Gaozu’s immediate successors were preoccupied with consolidating their domestic power, and it was not until 133 BCE, during the reign of Emperor Wu (the Martial Emperor), that the Han repudiated the agreement and invaded Xiongnu.
The emperor enjoyed his greatest success in 119 BCE when his generals Wei Qing and Huo Qubing penetrated deep into enemy territory (the latter reaching the shores of Lake Baikal) before combining at the Battle of Mobei to defeat the Xiongnu Chanyu. Thanks to their efforts, no major Xiongnu raid in northern China would occur until 103 BCE.
Despite the Xiongnu rival, by the 1st century CE, the confederation split between the Southern Xiongnu, who became Han vassals, and the Northern Xiongnu, who continued to resist but were eventually forced west. According to one popular theory, they would emerge as the Huns, who terrorized Rome in the 5th century CE.
The Western Regions
In 139 BCE, shortly after coming to the throne, Emperor Wu dispatched the diplomat Zhang Qian to forge alliances with western powers against the Xiongnu. After escaping Xiongnu captivity, he traveled as far west as Bactria (present-day Afghanistan). Zhang made note of the customs and economic potential of the countries he visited as well as states further afield, including the Parthian Empire.
Following Zhang Qian’s return to China in 125 BCE, the Great Wall was extended westwards to Dunhuang, protecting a narrow strip of territory known as the Hexi corridor that connected the Yellow River basin to the Gobi Desert. Han China thereby entered a trading system known as the Silk Road, although other goods, such as jade and horses, were also exchanged along the route.
After initially relying on diplomatic agreements with local rulers, the Han government established the Protectorate of the Western Regions in 60 BCE to establish permanent colonies. The Han lost control of the area at the turn of the century, and it was not until 91 CE when General Ban Chao was appointed protector-general of the Western Regions, that the territory was reconquered.
In 97 CE, Ban Chao sent his subordinate Gan Ying on a mission to Da Qin, the Chinese name for the Roman Empire, which only got as far as the Persian Gulf. In 166 CE, a party of men arrived in one of the empire’s southern ports (now northern Vietnam), claiming to be envoys of the Emperor Andun, which may refer to the reigning Emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus. This was probably not an official embassy but a group of merchants who wanted to bypass intermediaries and trade with China directly.
Rebellion and Restoration
During the second half of the 1st century BCE, the Han court was dominated by the Wang family, thanks to the influence of Empress Dowager Wang Zhengjun, the mother of Emperor Cheng (33–7 BCE). During Cheng’s reign, four successive members of the Wang clan served as marshal of state, an office that gave them de facto control of state administration. In 1 BCE, the empress dowager appointed her nephew Wang Mang as marshal in the government of the new Emperor Ping.
In 6 CE, Emperor Ping died at 14. Wang initially installed himself as acting emperor, and in 9 CE, he proclaimed himself emperor of the Xin Dynasty. He launched wide-ranging reforms, which included coinage reform, administrative reorganization, equal redistribution of land, an income tax on merchants and artisans, and limitations on slavery.
With the exception of land reform and the restrictions on slavery, Wang Mang followed in the path of previous Han emperors in his efforts to address the economic crisis facing the country, which was worsened by heavy flooding from the Yellow River. Such natural disasters were taken as a sign of heavenly disfavor and inspired rebellions throughout the empire.
By 22 CE, the peasant rebels, who called themselves the Red Eyebrows, formed an alliance with a branch of the Liu family distantly related to the Han imperial clan. The combined forces won several victories and captured Chang’an, and killed Wang Mang in October 23 CE. In August 25 CE, Liu Xiu ascended the throne as Emperor Guangwu and chose Luoyang as his capital. He spent the next decade pacifying the empire and consolidating the Eastern or Later Han Dynasty.
The Rise of the Eunuchs
By the time of his death in 57 CE, the Guangwu Emperor had done much to restore the Han to its former glory. His general Ma Yuan had defeated a rebellion of the Yue people in northern Vietnam led by the three Trung sisters, and Chinese diplomacy was breaking the power of the Xiongnu in the northwest. However, neither Guangwu nor his immediate successors were able to curb the corruption of aristocratic families who married into the imperial family.
By the late 1st century CE, the dominance of the aristocratic clans began to be challenged by the eunuchs, who owed their influence to the fact that they were the only men who had access to the palace women. While eunuchs had been barred from holding aristocratic titles, during the early 2nd century CE they obtained the right to be granted fiefs and to pass them down to adopted sons.
In 168 CE, when Emperor Ling came to the throne, the powerful regent Dou Wu aimed to eliminate the eunuchs, but his plans were intercepted, and the eunuch faction assumed control of the government and helped to maintain imperial authority during Emperor Ling’s reign. Upon the emperor’s death in 189, his brother-in-law He Jin took power as marshal and ordered the elimination of a powerful group of eunuchs known as the Ten Attendants. Although He Jin was killed by the eunuchs, his subordinate Yuan Shao massacred more than 2,000 eunuchs in retaliation. The political vacuum was filled by a general named Dong Zhuo, whose actions would precipitate the fall of the Han Dynasty.
