The Han dynasty, which ruled from 206 BC to AD 220 with a short break in the middle, gave its name to the Han Chinese, today the largest ethnic group in the world. Its founder, Liu Bang, was a minor official of peasant birth who came out on top in the civil war after Qin's fall. Han rulers denounced Qin cruelty, yet they kept Qin's system of commanderies and counties while easing its harshest laws and lowering taxes. Historians sometimes summarize the result as Qin structure with a gentler face.
Emperor Wu and the state
The most forceful Han ruler was Emperor Wu, who reigned from 141 to 87 BC. He made the Confucian classics the official learning of the state and in 124 BC founded an Imperial Academy to train officials in them (EAST 101 covers the ideas themselves). He also fought costly wars, and to pay for them his government took over salt and iron production as state monopolies. Officials argued that the monopolies funded defense and kept wealth from piling up with private merchants; critics said they made tools worse and dearer for farmers.
A remarkable record of this quarrel survives. In 81 BC, after Wu's death, the court summoned officials and scholars to debate whether the state monopolies on salt and iron should continue. The account, called the Discourses on Salt and Iron, reads like a modern policy argument about state enterprise, frontier spending and the morality of profit. The salt and iron monopolies largely stayed.
Han government also counted its people with care. A census taken in AD 2 recorded about 58 million people, one of the earliest large population counts anywhere.
The Xiongnu and Zhang Qian
Han's great rival was the Xiongnu, a confederation of nomadic horsemen on the northern steppe. After a Xiongnu army trapped Liu Bang in 200 BC, the Han adopted heqin, a policy of peace through marriage alliances and yearly gifts of silk, grain and wine to the Xiongnu ruler. Critics called it paying tribute to barbarians; defenders said it was cheaper than war. Emperor Wu abandoned it and went on the offensive.
Around 138 BC Wu sent an envoy named Zhang Qian west to seek allies against the Xiongnu among the Yuezhi, a people the Xiongnu had driven from their homeland. Zhang Qian was captured by the Xiongnu and held for about ten years, during which he married. He escaped, found the Yuezhi settled in Central Asia and uninterested in revenge, and was captured again on the way home. He returned some thirteen years after he left, with one companion of the original hundred or so. His reports of rich cities and fine horses in the Ferghana valley drew Han armies and trade westward.
What the Silk Road was
The name Silk Road is modern: the German geographer Ferdinand von Richthofen coined it in 1877. It suggests a single highway, but it was really a web of land and sea routes on which goods changed hands many times. Few merchants traveled from China to the Mediterranean; goods moved in stages, through oasis towns and middlemen such as the Parthians and later the Sogdians. Silk went west; horses, glass and new plants came east. Ideas used the same paths: Buddhism entered China from India and Central Asia during the Han.
History and its price
The greatest Han historian, Sima Qian, wrote the Records of the Grand Historian, a history of the known world from legendary times to his own. In 99 BC he spoke up in court for a general who had surrendered to the Xiongnu. Emperor Wu was enraged, and Sima Qian was sentenced to death. He could have taken his own life with honor; instead he accepted castration, a deep humiliation, so that he could finish his history. He wrote frankly about the faults of Han emperors and gave space to rebels, merchants and assassins as well as kings, and his model shaped Chinese history writing for two thousand years.
Decline
A court official, Wang Mang, seized the throne in AD 9 and was killed in AD 23; the restored Eastern Han ruled from Luoyang. In its last decades great families, court eunuchs and generals struggled over child emperors, and in 184 the Yellow Turban rebellion, led by a religious movement promising an age of peace, shook the empire. The generals who crushed it became warlords, and in 220 the Han ended, opening nearly four centuries of division.
Worked example: following a bolt of silk
Picture a bolt of silk woven near Chang'an in the first century AD. A Han official hands it to a frontier garrison as pay. At Dunhuang, at the edge of the desert, a merchant trades it for horses; in an oasis city such as Kashgar it changes hands again, perhaps to Parthian dealers who guard their place as middlemen. In AD 97 a Han envoy, Gan Ying, set out to reach Rome, but at the edge of Parthian lands he was warned that the sea crossing could take years, and he turned back. In Syria the silk might be unraveled and rewoven into lighter cloth for Roman buyers. When the Roman writer Pliny the Elder complained that India, China and Arabia drained a hundred million sesterces a year from the empire, he was looking at the last link in a chain he could not see. No one traveled the whole way, and Han and Rome knew each other mostly by rumor. That is what a web of routes means in practice.