Han Dynasty

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The Han dynasty was the second imperial dynasty of China, ruling from 206 BCE to 220 CE with one interruption — the span in which much of what later ages would call simply “Chinese” first hardened into form. It followed the short, ferocious Qin, whose unification it inherited and softened; the people of later centuries took the dynasty’s name for their own, and most ethnic Chinese still call themselves the Han.

The reign is conventionally divided in two. The Western (or Former) Han ruled from Chang’an until the throne was usurped around the start of the Common Era by the reformer Wang Mang, whose brief Xin dynasty collapsed in revolt; the Eastern (or Later) Han then restored the line from Luoyang and held until warlordism broke the empire apart in 220. Across both halves the machinery of a centralized bureaucratic state was built and refined — an administration recruited, in principle, on learning rather than birth.

That learning was Confucian. Under Emperor Wu in the second century BCE, scholars led by Dong Zhongshu secured the Confucian classics as the official curriculum and the texts an official was expected to master, fixing a canon that would govern Chinese intellectual life for two millennia. The Confucianism of the Han, though, was not the ethics of Confucius alone; it was fused with a cosmology of correlation, in which the forces of yin and yang and the Five Phases bound together the seasons, the body, the colors, the organs of the state, and the movements of heaven into a single responsive order. Omen and portent were read as the cosmos commenting on the conduct of the throne. This correlative thinking is among the period’s most consequential legacies, and it underwrites much of the divinatory and medical tradition that followed.

The dynasty’s last century is also where organized religious Daoism enters the historical record. The philosophical Daoism of the Daodejing and the Zhuangzi was older, but in the second century CE it acquired institutions: the Way of the Celestial Masters, founded — by its own account — when the deified Laozi appeared to Zhang Daoling and granted him a covenant, established a priesthood, a liturgy of confession and healing, and for a time a governed territory. A parallel movement, the Way of Great Peace, fed the Yellow Turban uprising that helped bring the dynasty down. What scholarship can establish is the emergence of these communities and their texts; what their adherents held was that Laozi was a god, that the cosmos could be petitioned, and that sickness was the outward sign of moral fault.

The Han thus sits at a junction. It is where the bureaucratic state, the Confucian canon, the correlative cosmos, and a Daoism with altars and clergy all took the forms that later China would inherit, argue with, and rebuild. The dynasty ended; the patterns it set did not.

→ In the library: Legge — The Texts of Tâoism (1891)

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