Chinese Empire

Famous Wars and Conquests of Imperial China

For more than two thousand years, the history of imperial China was shaped by war. Every dynasty came to power through conquest, and most dynasties fell to a combination of foreign invasion and internal rebellion. The Qin’s unification of 221 BCE was itself the conclusion of a 250-year war among the Warring States. The Han held off the Xiongnu nomads for centuries, and the dynasty’s collapse in 220 CE opened three and a half centuries of division. The Tang reunified the empire in 618, only to see its power shattered by the An Lushan Rebellion of 755–763. The Song invented gunpowder and lost the north to the Jurchen and the Mongols. The Ming pushed the Mongols back behind the Great Wall, then lost the throne to a peasant rebel and a Manchu invasion. The Qing, the last imperial dynasty, presided over a vast expansion and then a long nineteenth-century retreat. This section surveys the great set-piece conflicts of imperial Chinese history, and complements the broader narrative in the Chinese military section and the history of imperial China.

The wars treated here are arranged in roughly chronological order. The Chu–Han Contention (206–202 BCE) decided the successor to the Qin. The Han–Xiongnu Wars (133 BCE – 89 CE) defined the Han empire’s northern frontier. The An Lushan Rebellion (755–763) was the most devastating civil war of medieval China, examined in detail in our in-depth piece on the An Lushan Rebellion. The Song–Jin Wars (1125–1234) ended the Northern Song and produced a century of Southern Song retrenchment. The Mongol Conquest of the Song (1235–1279) was the climax of the Mongol world empire and the topic of our in-depth piece on the Mongol conquest of the Song. The Ming Campaigns against the Mongols (1372–1449, including the disastrous Tumu Crisis of 1449) shaped the early Ming and its Great Wall policy. The Qing Conquest of the Ming (1618–1683) was the last great conquest of imperial China.

The Chu–Han Contention (206–202 BCE)

The Qin dynasty fell in 207 BCE under the weight of its own labour demands and a coalition of rebel armies. Within a few years, the coalition had dissolved into a four-way war for supremacy among Liu Bang (Emperor Gaozu of Han), Xiang Yu of Chu, and the kings of Qi and Zhao. The war was decided in a series of set-piece battles: the Battle of Pengcheng in 205 BCE, in which Xiang Yu routed Liu Bang’s numerically superior army; the Battle of Jingxing in 204 BCE, in which Liu Bang’s general Han Xin destroyed the Zhao army; the Battle of Wei River in 203 BCE, in which Liu Bang defeated another Xiang Yu ally; and the climactic Battle of Gaixia in 202 BCE, in which Liu Bang’s forces trapped Xiang Yu’s army and forced his suicide. The war established the Han dynasty (202 BCE – 220 CE), which would rule China for four hundred years and give the Han Chinese their name.

The Chu–Han Contention is a textbook example of a war decided by logistics as much as by generalship. Liu Bang’s army was smaller and tactically inferior to Xiang Yu’s, but it was better supplied, better led in the long run, and based in a more defensible region (the Guanzhong plain of modern Shaanxi). The Han victory produced a new model of imperial Chinese statecraft: a centralised bureaucracy, a Confucian ideology, and a foreign policy of accommodation with the northern nomads that would last for centuries. The longer story of the founding of the Han is told in the Chinese dynasties survey and the Chinese emperors section.

The Han–Xiongnu Wars (133 BCE – 89 CE)

The Xiongnu were a confederation of nomadic peoples who dominated the eastern Eurasian steppe from the third century BCE to the late first century CE. The early Han emperors bought peace with tribute and marriage alliances; Emperor Wu (r. 141–87 BCE) decided that the cost of tribute had become too high, and began a series of campaigns that lasted for nearly a century. The wars were fought in the deserts and steppes of modern Mongolia, Gansu, and Xinjiang, across distances that strained Han logistics. The Han built the Great Wall deep into the Gansu corridor, established the Wuwei, Zhangye, Jiuquan, and Dunhuang commanderies, and pushed the Xiongnu back into the Altai Mountains. By the end of Emperor Wu’s reign, the Han had a permanent force of perhaps 100,000 cavalry on the northern frontier, supported by allied Wuhuan and Xiongnu auxiliaries.

The Han–Xiongnu wars were the first great engagement between Chinese agrarian empire and Inner Asian nomad confederation, and they set the pattern for two thousand years. The pattern was rarely simple: the Han eventually split the Xiongnu confederation by diplomacy and military pressure, with the Southern Xiongnu submitting to the Han and the Northern Xiongnu being driven westward into Central Asia (where they are sometimes identified with the Huns of European history). The pattern was repeated with the Xianbei, the Rouran, the Tujue (Turks), the Uyghurs, the Khitan, the Jurchen, the Mongols, and the Manchus, each in turn. The history of Chinese foreign relations with the steppe is treated in the Chinese government section and the Chinese economy section, both of which discuss the tribute system and the Silk Road.

The An Lushan Rebellion (755–763)

The An Lushan Rebellion of 755–763 was the most devastating civil war in Chinese history before the nineteenth century. It began as a mutiny by the Sogdian-Turkic general An Lushan, who commanded a frontier army of 150,000 men and marched them against the Tang capital Chang’an. The Tang emperor Xuanzong fled to Sichuan, and An Lushan occupied the capital in 756. An Lushan was murdered by his son in 757, but the rebellion continued for six more years under his successors. The war was finally put down in 763 with the help of Uyghur cavalry, by which time the Tang had been forced to recognise the de facto independence of a string of regional military commanders. The longer story see our in-depth piece on the An Lushan Rebellion.

The An Lushan Rebellion is treated by historians as a turning point in Chinese history. It weakened the central government, decentralised military command, and inaugurated the era of jiedushi (regional military commissioners) that would eventually destroy the Tang. It also marked the beginning of the long economic decline of north China, the rise of the south as the demographic and economic centre of the empire, and the transformation of the Tang aristocracy into a less privileged, more bureaucratic class. The cultural and economic consequences of the rebellion are discussed in the Chinese culture and Chinese economy pillars.

The Song–Jin Wars (1125–1234)

The Jin (金) was a Jurchen state founded in 1115 in modern Manchuria. In 1125 the Jin invaded the Northern Song, and in 1127 captured the Song capital Kaifeng in one of the most traumatic events in Chinese history, the so-called Jingkang Incident (靖康之變). The emperor and his court were carried off into captivity in Manchuria; a prince of the blood escaped south and re-established the dynasty at Hangzhou as the Southern Song (1127–1279). The Southern Song fought the Jin for nearly a century, with mixed results, until the rise of the Mongols changed everything.

The Song–Jin wars were fought in a complex environment of cavalry, river warfare, and gunpowder weapons. The Song invented or refined many gunpowder weapons during these wars, including the fire lance, the gunpowder bomb, and the rocket, and the dynasty’s navy was the most powerful in East Asia. The Jin, having adopted much of Chinese culture, were also a formidable opponent, with their own cavalry traditions and a sophisticated political structure. The wars ended in 1234 when the Song and the Mongols jointly destroyed the Jin, only for the Mongols to turn on the Song a year later. The story of the Song dynasty is told in the Chinese dynasties survey and the Chinese emperors section.

The Mongol Conquest of the Song (1235–1279)

The Mongol conquest of the Song was the longest, bloodiest, and most complete conquest in Chinese history. It was also the climactic military campaign of the Mongol world empire, the largest contiguous land empire in history. The Mongols under Ögedei Khan invaded the Song in 1235, and the war lasted until 1279, when the last Song emperor, the child Emperor Bing, drowned at the Battle of Yamen. The campaign was fought on three fronts: the north China plain, the Sichuan basin, and the Yangzi valley. The decisive moment was the siege of Xiangyang (1268–1273), in which the Mongols, having acquired Chinese and Muslim engineers, deployed counterweighted trebuchets, gunpowder bombs, and a substantial fleet to take the previously impregnable twin cities of Xiangyang and Fancheng. The longer story see our in-depth piece on the Mongol conquest of the Song.

The Mongol conquest reshaped China. The Yuan dynasty (1271–1368), founded by Kublai Khan, was the first dynasty in Chinese history to rule the whole of China from outside the Han Chinese cultural sphere. The Yuan inherited the Mongol four-class hierarchy (Mongols, Semu, Han, Southerners), retained Mongol military and administrative institutions, and connected China to the wider Mongol world empire. The economic and cultural consequences of the conquest are treated in the Chinese economy and Chinese culture pillars, and the longer history of the Yuan in the Chinese dynasties survey.

The Ming Campaigns Against the Mongols (1372–1449)

The Ming dynasty was founded in 1368 by Zhu Yuanzhang, a former soldier and rebel leader who had been one of the lieutenants of the Red Turbans. The first Ming emperor (the Hongwu Emperor) drove the Mongols out of north China in a series of campaigns between 1368 and 1372. His son and successor, the Yongle Emperor, took the war to the Mongols in five major northern expeditions between 1410 and 1424, personally leading the armies deep into the steppe. The Yongle Emperor died at the start of the fifth campaign, at Yingzhou (應昌, in present-day Inner Mongolia) in 1424, and his successors gradually shifted from offensive operations to static defence. The Ming Great Wall, rebuilt in brick and stone, was the visible symbol of this shift.

The Ming–Mongol wars ended in disaster with the Tumu Crisis of 1449, in which the Zhengtong Emperor personally led an army of 200,000 against the Oirat Mongol leader Esen Taiji, was defeated, and was captured. The crisis, sometimes called the Yingzong Crisis, was the worst military disaster in Ming history: the emperor was held prisoner for a year, the central government was thrown into chaos, and the Ming abandoned the offensive against the Mongols for good. The Ming thereafter relied on the Great Wall, the weisuo garrisons, and the Tumu-style border markets to manage the Mongol threat. The military consequences of the Tumu Crisis are treated in the Chinese emperors section and the Chinese government section, and the Great Wall as a defensive system in our in-depth piece on the Great Wall as a military structure.

The Qing Conquest of the Ming (1618–1683)

The Qing conquest of the Ming was the last great conquest of imperial China. The Qing, descended from the Jurchen of Manchuria, were originally organised by the chieftain Nurhaci into the Eight Banners in the late sixteenth century. In 1618 Nurhaci’s son Hong Taiji declared war on the Ming, and over the next two decades the Qing fought a series of campaigns against a collapsing Ming. The Ming fell in 1644 to a peasant rebel, Li Zicheng, whose army took Beijing; the last Ming emperor hanged himself on the Coal Hill behind the Forbidden City. The Ming general Wu Sangui, then commanding the Shanhai Pass garrison on the Great Wall, opened the pass to the Qing in return for help against Li Zicheng. The Qing entered China, defeated Li Zicheng, and within forty years had completed the conquest of the rest of the Ming territory.

The Qing conquest was the most thorough conquest in Chinese history, in the sense that the conquerors remained a distinct military caste for the entire dynastic period. The banner system was preserved, the Manchu language was used alongside Chinese, and the Qing maintained a separate Manchu homeland in Manchuria. The conquest also produced a long period of war and devastation: the Three Feudatories Rebellion (1673–1681), in which three Qing viceroys in the south revolted and had to be suppressed at great cost; the conquest of Taiwan in 1683; and the incorporation of Mongolia, Xinjiang, and Tibet in the eighteenth century. The longer story of the Qing is told in the Chinese dynasties survey and the Chinese emperors section.

The Aftermath: From Qing Power to Imperial Collapse

The Qing dynasty’s eighteenth-century high point ended with the Opium Wars of 1839–1860, the Taiping Rebellion of 1850–1864, the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–1895, and the Boxer Rebellion of 1900. Each of these was, in a sense, the consequence of a military system that had fallen behind. The Taiping Rebellion, in which a self-proclaimed Christian sect under Hong Xiuquan captured Nanjing and held it for eleven years, was suppressed only by the regional xibing armies of Zeng Guofan and Li Hongzhang, which laid the foundation for the warlord era. The Sino-Japanese War ended with the Qing cession of Taiwan and the payment of an enormous indemnity, and the Boxer Rebellion ended with the burning of the Yuanmingyuan (Summer Palace) and a further indemnity. The Xinhai Revolution of 1911–1912 overthrew the dynasty, and the last emperor, Puyi, abdicated on 12 February 1912. The military and political collapse of the Qing is treated in the section on the fall of imperial China.

In this section