The Han dynasty
Four centuries that define what being Chinese means.
- When
- —
- Duration
- 425 years
- Known to
- ± 10 years
- Era
- Classical, Holocene
The Han rule from 206 BCE, keeping Qin's centralised administration while softening its Legalism with Confucian rhetoric, and establishing an examined bureaucracy. The period gives China its enduring self-description — the majority ethnic group still calls itself Han — and produces the Silk Road, paper, the seismometer, state monopolies on salt and iron, and a population of some sixty million, comparable to Rome's at the same moment.