Chinese Empire

The Imperial Chinese Dynasties: From the Qin to the Qing

For more than two thousand years, from 221 BCE to 1912 CE, China was an empire ruled by emperors, not a federation of kingdoms or a network of city-states. The imperial period produced some of the most impressive political institutions ever devised: a centralised bureaucratic state governed by merit, a sophisticated legal code, a tax-collecting census, an examination-based civil service, and a monopoly on the legitimate use of force. It also produced some of history’s most spectacular collapses: periods of disunion so prolonged that contemporaries wondered whether the empire would ever be restored. The story of the imperial dynasties is the story of how that tension — between unity and fragmentation, between the centralising instinct of the state and the centrifugal pressures of geography and region — played out across two millennia.

This section covers the imperial dynasties proper, beginning with the Qin unification in 221 BCE and ending with the fall of the Qing in 1912. We discuss the dynasties in roughly chronological order, with special attention to the great unifying dynasties (Qin, Han, Sui, Tang, Song, Ming, Qing) and the periods of disunion (Three Kingdoms, Sixteen Kingdoms, Northern and Southern Dynasties, Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms). The two conquest dynasties, the Yuan and the Qing, are introduced here in their dynastic context and then treated at greater length in the section on Mongol and Manchu rule.

The Qin Dynasty (221–206 BCE)

The Qin state, located in the upper Wei River valley, was the westernmost of the Warring States and the most thoroughly Legalist in its administration. Under Shi Huangdi (the First Emperor, r. 221–210 BCE), the Qin conquered the other six warring states one by one between 230 and 221 BCE, then declared the abolition of feudal titles and the establishment of a new kind of state. The First Emperor divided the empire into 36 commanderies, each subdivided into counties, and appointed centrally selected officials to govern them. He standardised the script, the weight system, the coinage, and the axle width of carts. He ordered the construction of a network of imperial highways, the digging of irrigation canals, and the connection of older walls into a single defensive line — the ancestor of the modern Great Wall.

Qin rule was harsh. The First Emperor burned books that did not conform to the state ideology in 213 BCE and buried scholars alive. Labour demands were crushing: hundreds of thousands of conscripts were used to build the emperor’s tomb (with its famous terracotta army near modern Xi’an), his palaces, and his defensive works. When the First Emperor died in 210 BCE, his son and successor proved incompetent. Within three years the dynasty was rocked by rebellions, and in 206 BCE the Qin fell to a coalition led by the peasant rebel Liu Bang and the general Xiang Yu. The resulting Chu-Han Contention ended in 202 BCE with Liu Bang’s victory and the founding of the Han Dynasty.

The Han Dynasty (202 BCE – 220 CE)

The Han is the second of China’s two foundational dynasties, the one that gave the Han Chinese their ethnonym. Founded by the peasant Liu Bang (Emperor Gaozu, r. 202–195 BCE), the Han ruled in two main phases: the Western Han (or Former Han, 202 BCE – 9 CE), with its capital at Chang’an, and the Eastern Han (25–220 CE), with its capital at Luoyang. Between them, the usurper Wang Mang briefly established the Xin Dynasty (9–23 CE), which attempted a radical program of land nationalisation and currency reform before being swept away by flooding of the Yellow River and a peasant rebellion that produced the Red Eyebrows.

Han government combined Qin centralisation with Confucian ideology. The Emperor Wu (r. 141–87 BCE) made Confucianism the state orthodoxy, established the Imperial Academy to train scholars, and instituted the early version of the civil service examination. Han armies pushed into Central Asia along the Silk Road, defeated the Xiongnu nomads, and colonised parts of Korea and Vietnam. Han technology and culture — paper, the seismograph, the armillary sphere, historical writing — set standards for two thousand years. The Han collapsed in 220 CE amid eunuch corruption, factionalism at court, and a mass peasant uprising led by the Yellow Turbans, beginning the period of disunion known as the Three Kingdoms.

The Three Kingdoms and the Western Jin (220–317 CE)

The Three Kingdoms (220–280 CE) were three successor states to the Han: Wei in the north, Shu in the southwest (based in Sichuan), and Wu in the southeast. The period is one of the most famous in Chinese popular culture, immortalised in the novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms. In 265 CE the Wei general Sima Yan usurped the throne and founded the Jin Dynasty (Western Jin). The Jin reunified China in 280 by conquering Wu, but the union was brief.

In 311 CE a Xiongnu-led army sacked Luoyang, and in 316 CE the Jin capital at Chang’an fell. The Jin court fled to the south, beginning the Eastern Jin (317–420 CE) and the long period of disunion known as the Sixteen Kingdoms in the north and the Southern Dynasties in the south.

The Sixteen Kingdoms and the Northern and Southern Dynasties (304–589 CE)

The period from 304 to 589 CE was the longest sustained period of disunion in Chinese history. The north was ruled by a rapid succession of non-Han states, founded by Xiongnu, Xianbei, Jie, Di, Qiang, and other peoples collectively known as the Five Barbarians. The most important were the Later Zhao, Former Yan, Former Qin, Later Yan, Northern Wei, and Northern Qi. The south was ruled by a sequence of refugee Han Chinese dynasties based at Jiankang (modern Nanjing): the Liu Song, Southern Qi, Liang, and Chen, collectively the Southern Dynasties.

The era was one of cultural transformation. Buddhism, which had entered China in the Han, became a mass religion, and the great cave-temple complexes at Dunhuang, Yungang, and Longmen were begun. Southern China, with its warmer climate and access to the sea, became increasingly wealthy relative to the war-torn north. The period ended with the Northern Zhou general Yang Jian founding the Sui Dynasty in 581 and reunifying China in 589 by conquering the Chen.

The Sui Dynasty (581–618 CE)

The Sui is one of the most underrated dynasties in Chinese history. Its founder, Emperor Wen of Sui (r. 581–604), restored central authority, redistributed land, lightened taxes, and rebuilt the economy. His son, Emperor Yang of Sui (r. 604–618), completed the Grand Canal linking the Yellow River and the Yangzi, modernised the Great Wall, and launched catastrophic wars against Goguryeo in Korea. The cost of these wars, combined with the strain of building the canal, provoked a series of rebellions in which Emperor Yang was killed. The Sui fell, and out of the chaos emerged the Tang.

The Tang Dynasty (618–907 CE)

The Tang is the dynasty most often cited as the golden age of imperial China. Founded by Li Yuan (Emperor Gaozu) in 618, the Tang reached its peak under Emperor Taizong (r. 626–649), who defeated the Eastern Turks, took control of the Silk Road, and presided over a flourishing of poetry, painting, and sculpture. Under Emperor Xuanzong (r. 712–756), Tang China was the most cosmopolitan state in the world: its capital Chang’an had perhaps a million inhabitants, foreign merchants lived in their own quarters, and the Buddhist monk Xuanzang made his famous pilgrimage to India. Tang culture spread to Japan, Korea, and Vietnam, leaving a permanent mark on all three.

The Tang was also politically innovative. It was the only dynasty in which a woman, Wu Zetian, ruled openly as emperor regnant (r. 690–705). The Tang codified the law, expanded the examination system, and made the capital the centre of an international world. The An Lushan Rebellion of 755–763 shattered Tang central power, and the dynasty staggered on for a century and a half in diminished form before collapsing in 907.

The Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms (907–979 CE)

The collapse of the Tang produced a brief but chaotic period of disunion: the Five Dynasties in the north (Later Liang, Later Tang, Later Jin, Later Han, Later Zhou) and the Ten Kingdoms in the south. The period saw the rise of the Khitan Liao in the northeast, the annexation of the Sixteen Prefectures by them in 938, and the gradual reconstitution of central authority by the Later Zhou under Guo Wei and Chai Rong. When the Later Zhou collapsed in 960, one of its generals, Zhao Kuangyin, founded the Song.

The Song Dynasty (960–1279 CE)

The Song is often called the most economically and technologically advanced civilisation of its time. It is associated with the invention or widespread use of printing, gunpowder, the compass, paper money, and water-powered textile machinery. Its capital, first Bianjing (modern Kaifeng) and later Lin’an (modern Hangzhou), was the largest and most sophisticated city in the world. Song art, especially landscape painting, and Song Neo-Confucianism defined Chinese high culture for centuries.

But the Song was politically weak. It never controlled the Sixteen Prefectures or the steppe frontier, and it lost the north to the Jurchen Jin in 1127. The court fled south to establish the Southern Song (1127–1279), which held the Yangzi valley for another 150 years before falling to the Mongols in 1279. The Song is the first dynasty in our survey that never fully reunified China.

The Yuan Dynasty (1271–1368 CE)

The Yuan was the dynasty of Kublai Khan (r. 1260–1294), grandson of Genghis. The Mongols conquered the Jin in 1234, and Kublai completed the conquest of the Southern Song in 1279, becoming the first foreigner to rule all of China. The Yuan inherited the steppe institutions of the Mongol Empire and a vast Eurasian system stretching from Korea to Hungary. Kublai established his capital at Khanbaliq (modern Beijing), patronised Tibetan Buddhism, opened China to foreign merchants, and was the China described by Marco Polo. The Yuan is detailed in Mongol and Manchu rule and in our Yuan Dynasty in practice.

The Ming Dynasty (1368–1644 CE)

The Ming was founded by the Buddhist monk-turned-rebel Zhu Yuanzhang (Emperor Hongwu, r. 1368–1398), who expelled the Mongols and re-established Han Chinese rule. The early Ming was an age of restoration and expansion: the Hongwu emperor rebuilt the agrarian economy, redistributed land, and reorganised the army; the Yongle emperor (r. 1403–1424) moved the capital from Nanjing to Beijing, sent the Zheng He treasure voyages across the Indian Ocean to East Africa, and began the rebuilding of the Great Wall in brick and stone. The Forbidden City, the Temple of Heaven, and the Ming tombs in Beijing all date from this period.

The late Ming suffered fiscal crisis, factionalism at court, the corruption of the eunuch establishment, and the cost of defending the northern frontier. A series of natural disasters in the 1630s produced a massive peasant uprising led by Li Zicheng, whose forces entered Beijing in April 1644. The last Ming emperor, the Chongzhen emperor, hanged himself on the coal hill behind the palace. Within weeks, the Manchus, who had been waiting at the Shanhai Pass, were invited in by the Ming general Wu Sangui to help suppress the rebellion — and stayed.

The Qing Dynasty (1644–1912 CE)

The Qing is detailed in Mongol and Manchu rule. It was the last imperial dynasty of China, the second of the great conquest dynasties, and the dynasty that ruled the largest Chinese state in history. The early Qing emperors — Shunzhi (r. 1644–1661), Kangxi (r. 1661–1722), Yongzheng (r. 1722–1735), and Qianlong (r. 1735–1796) — presided over the conquest of Xinjiang, Mongolia, Tibet, and Taiwan, the greatest territorial expansion in Chinese history, and a long eighteenth-century economic boom that doubled the population from 150 million to 300 million.

The nineteenth century was a long crisis: the Opium Wars with Britain, the Taiping Rebellion of 1850–1864 (which killed perhaps 20 million people), the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–1895, the Boxer Rebellion of 1900, and the Xinhai Revolution of 1911, which overthrew the dynasty. The last emperor, Puyi, abdicated on 12 February 1912. The end of the imperial system is detailed in the section on the fall of imperial China.

Across the imperial period, two broad trends can be distinguished: unifying trends that pushed the empire toward centralisation and homogeneity, and diversifying trends that pushed it toward fragmentation and regionalism.

The unifying trends included:

  • The Qin-Han institutional framework of centralised bureaucracy, commanderies and counties, and the standardisation of script, weights, and measures.
  • The Confucian ideology of the scholar-official, the examination system, and the unified elite culture.
  • The Sui-Tang restoration of unified rule after the long disunion of the Northern and Southern Dynasties.
  • The Song commercial revolution and the integration of southern and eastern China into a single market.
  • The Yuan-Ming-Qing incorporation of Manchuria, Mongolia, Tibet, and Xinjiang into a single imperial state.

The diversifying trends included:

  • The regional economies of the south, which grew wealthier than the north from the Tang onwards.
  • The steppe frontier, which repeatedly produced nomadic empires (Xiongnu, Turks, Khitan, Jurchen, Mongols, Manchus) that invaded and sometimes conquered China.
  • The bureaucratic corruption and factionalism that periodically weakened central authority and produced cycles of usurpation.
  • The cultural pluralism of south China, with its distinctive languages, customs, and maritime orientation.

The interplay of these trends produced the rhythm of unity and disunion that defines Chinese imperial history. For the question of how to count these dynasties — the major ones, the minor ones, the conquest dynasties, the brief usurpers — see our article on how many dynasties China had. For the question of which dynasty lasted the longest, see our piece on the longest Chinese dynasty.

Legacy of the Imperial Dynasties

The imperial dynasties left a permanent legacy. The Confucian-educated scholar-official, the civil service examination, the centralised bureaucratic state, the capital city as the centre of an integrated economy, the family-based agrarian village, the standardised written language — all of these were products of the imperial period and survived into the twentieth century. Even after 1912, the institutions and mental habits of the imperial period continued to shape Chinese politics, society, and culture. The survey of those institutions is continued in the section on Chinese government, and the cultural legacy in the section on Chinese culture.

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