The Chinese Empire
The word China was probably derived from “Chin” (Qin).
Though the unified reign of the Qin Emperor lasted only 12 years, he managed to subdue great parts of what constitutes the core of the Han Chinese homeland and to unite them under a tightly centralized Legalist government seated at Xianyang (in modern Xian). His sons, however, were not as successful; as soon as the Qin reign ended, the Qin imperial structure collapsed.
The Han Dynasty emerged in 202 BC; it was the first dynasty to embrace Confucianism, which became the ideological underpinning of all regimes until the end of imperial China. Under the Han dynasty, the Chinese civilization made great advances in historiography, arts and science. Emperor Wu of Han China (Han Wudi) consolidated and extended the Chinese empire by pushing back the Xiongnu (sometimes identified with the Huns) into the steppes of modern Inner Mongolia and wrested the modern areas of Gansu, Ningxia and Qinghai from the Xiongnu; this enabled the first opening of trading connections between China and the occident: the Silk Road.
Nevertheless land acquisitions by elite families had gradually drained the tax base. In AD 9 the usurper Wang Mang founded the short-lived Xin Dynasty and started an extensive program of land reform and innovative monetary and economic reforms. These programs, however, were never supported by land-holding families; and, though they favored the peasant and lesser gentry, the instability they produced brought on chaos and uprisings. Emperor Guangwu of Han China reinstated the Han dynasty with the support of land-holding and merchant families at Luoyang, east of Xian; hence the new era is termed the Eastern Han Dynasty. Han power declined again in the midst of land acquisitions, invasions and struggles of consort clans and eunuchs. The Yellow Turban Rebellion broke out in 184, ushering in an era of warlords. In the ensuing turmoil, three states tried to gain predominance in the Period of the Three Kingdoms, a time that has since been greatly romanticized in works such as Romance of the Three Kingdoms.
Though these three kingdoms were reunited temporarily in 280 by the (Western) Jin dynasty, the contemporary non-Han Chinese (Wu Hu) ethnic groups ravaged the country in the early 4th century and provoked large-scale Han Chinese migrations to south of the Chang Jiang. In 303 the Di people rebelled and later captured Chengdu. Under Liu Yuan the Xiongnu rebelled near today’s Linfen County; his successor Liu Cong captured and executed the last two Western Jin emperors. More than Sixteen states were established by these ethnic groups. The chaotic north was temporarily unified by Fu Jian who was defeated at the Battle of Feishui when he attempted to invade South China. Later on, Emperor Taiwu of Northern Wei reunified north China again, marking the beginning of the Northern Dynasties, a sequence of local regimes ruling over regions north of Chang Jiang.
Along with the refugees from the North, Emperor Yuan of Jin China reinstated the Jin regime at Nanjing in the south; from this came the sequence of Southern dynasties of Song, Qi, Liang and Chen, which all had their capitals at Jiankang (near today’s Nanjing). As China was ruled by two independent dynasties, one in the south and the other in the north, this is called the era of Southern and Northern Dynasties. The short-lived Sui Dynasty managed to reunite the country in 589 after almost 300 years of disjunction.
In 618, the Tang dynasty was established, opening a new age of prosperity and innovations in arts and technology. Buddhism, which had slowly seeped into China in the first century, became the predominant religion and was widely adopted by the royal family. Changan (modern Xian), the national capital, is thought to have been the world’s biggest city. The Tang and Han are often referenced as the prosperous ages of China; the Tang, like the Han, established jurisdiction on trade routes. However, the Tang dynasty declined in the end, eventually succumbing to the ambitions of warlords; another time of political chaos followed, the Five dynasties and the Ten kingdoms.
In 960, the Song Dynasty (960-1279) gained power over most of China and established its capital in Kaifeng, establishing a period of economic prosperity, while the Khitan Liao Dynasty ruled over Manchuria and eastern Mongolia. In 1115 the Jurchen Jin Dynasty (1115-1234) emerged to prominence, annihilating the Liao Dynasty in 10 years. It also took power over northern China and Kaifeng from the Song Dynasty, which moved its capital to Hangzhou. The Southern Song Dynasty also suffered the humiliation of having to acknowledge the Jin Dynasty as formal overlords. In the ensuing years China was divided between the Song Dynasty, the Jin Dynasty, and the Tangut Western Xia. Southern Song was a period of great technological development which can be explained in part by the military pressure that it felt from the north.
