Early Imperial China

Abstract

The year 221 bce is of particular symbolic significance in the history of China. It was the year that the kingdom of Qin 秦 formally concluded centuries of warfare with conquest of all rival states at the eastern end of the Eurasian landmass and thus achieved unification of the Chinese realm. The Qin monarch subsequently declared himself the First Emperor, with the hope that his dynasty would last for myriad generations, and proclaimed the establishment of a centralized territorial empire, hence marking the beginning of China’s imperial age that stretched for over two millennia. Contrary to the First Emperor’s expectations, the Qin dynasty (221–206 bce) collapsed shortly after his own death. The institutional foundation that it laid, however, left an indelible impact on and constituted the backbone of the Chinese imperial apparatus that all the subsequent dynasties were to follow fundamentally. It is also said that the name “China” is derived from Qin since it was the first polity that unified the land and spread its fame afar in the ancient world. The immediate succeeding dynasty known as Han 漢 had been one of the power contenders in a civil war that toppled the Qin empire, but it embraced faithfully the Qin institutional legacy. The Han dynasty was commonly subdivided into two halves, namely, the Western/Former Han (202 bce–9 ce) and the Eastern/Later (used conventionally, but some scholars adopted the term “Latter”) Han (25–220 ce), by an interregnum of the usurper Wang Mang 王莽, who had served as the regent of the Western Han dynasty and eventually created his own that was named Xin 新 (9–23 ce). The two Han dynasties, and the Xin dynasty as well, had their own characters, sometimes quite contrasting, but together their nearly four-century reign further consolidated the imperial bureaucratic system, delineated the core territory of historical China, entrenched the ideological pursuit of a unified China, and fostered the Chinese cultural and ethnic identities. The name Han is to this day used to identify the largest Chinese ethnic group, and their language and script. Given the institutional continuity between the Qin and Han dynasties, which is also a widely discussed topic among modern scholarship, Chinese historiography conventionally pairs them as one epoch as Qin-Han; meanwhile, a kind of modern periodization frames the period with the term “Early Imperial China” to emphasize its formative role in the history of imperial China.