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. Four centuries are a long time for any settlement of the world to hold, and the Han held longer than that: the arrangements made under it — a literate bureaucracy, a canon of sage books, a cosmos in which heaven kept accounts with the throne, and at the close a Daoism with priests and altars — became the floor on which two further millennia of Chinese life were built.

The shape of the dynasty

The founder was a commoner. Liu Bang, a minor official of peasant stock who rose in the wars that destroyed the Qin, took the title King of Han in 206 BCE and the imperial title itself in 202, ruling as Gaozu — the first man of low birth to found a Chinese dynasty, and proof against the older assumption that the throne belonged to the well-born. The reign is conventionally divided in two. The Western (or Former) Han ruled from Chang’an, near the old Qin heart in the Wei valley, building over the first century and a half the apparatus of a centralized empire. Around the start of the Common Era the throne was usurped by Wang Mang, a powerful regent and reformer who in 9 CE set aside the infant Liu heir and proclaimed his own Xin (“New”) dynasty. His program — a sweep of classicizing reforms in land, coinage, and office, justified by appeal to the golden antiquity the classics described — foundered amid floods, famine, and the catastrophic shift of the Yellow River’s course; revolt broke out, and in 23 CE Wang Mang was killed in his burning palace. A Liu claimant restored the line in 25 as Guangwu, founding the Eastern (or Later) Han and moving the capital east to Luoyang. That second house held for nearly two centuries more, until court factionalism, eunuch power, and rural uprising shattered its authority; the last Han emperor was a puppet of warlords long before the formal abdication of 220 ended the dynasty and opened the age of the Three Kingdoms.

Across both halves the machinery of a centralized bureaucratic state was built and refined — an administration that ran the empire through commanderies and counties, kept written records and population registers, collected tax in grain and labor, and was staffed, in principle, by men recruited on learning rather than birth. Recommendation by merit, examination on the classics, and a state academy to train officials all took early form here. The principle was never perfectly honored — great families entrenched themselves, and influence often outran ability — but the idea that the right to govern was earned through mastery of texts, and not simply inherited, entered Chinese political life in the Han and never left it. It is the deep root of the imperial examination system that would shape the country down to the twentieth century.

The canon made official

That learning was Confucian. The early Han had favored a more laissez-faire governing philosophy, the so-called Huang-Lao teaching — a blend named for the Yellow Emperor (Huangdi) and Laozi that prized minimal interference and quiet rule, and that suited a dynasty recovering from the exhaustion of the Qin wars. The turn came under Emperor Wu, the expansionist ruler whose long reign spanned much of the second century BCE. Scholars led by Dong Zhongshu (c. 179–104 BCE) persuaded the throne to make the Confucian classics the official curriculum and to dismiss the teachers of rival schools from court. Around 136 BCE chairs were established for the Five Classics — the Book of Changes, the Book of Documents, the Book of Odes, the Spring and Autumn Annals, and the records of ritual — and an Imperial Academy, the Taixue, was founded to train officials in them. From that point the texts an official was expected to master were fixed, and a canon was set that would govern Chinese intellectual life for two millennia. The works of Confucius and his heirs became less a school among schools than the syllabus of the state itself.

The Confucianism of the Han, though, was not the ethics of Confucius alone. It was fused with a cosmology of correlation, and Dong Zhongshu was its great architect. In the writings gathered under his name — the Chunqiu fanlu, the Luxuriant Gems of the Spring and Autumn — the moral teaching of the classics was wired into the structure of the cosmos itself. The forces of yin and yang, the receptive and the active, and the Five Phases — wood, fire, earth, metal, water — bound together the seasons, the human body, the colors, the points of the compass, the organs of the state, and the movements of heaven into a single responsive order. Ruler answered to Heaven as son to father; governance in tune with the cosmic pattern brought harvest and peace, and governance against it brought drought, flood, eclipse, and swarm. Omen and portent were therefore read as the cosmos commenting on the conduct of the throne — Heaven’s warnings before its judgments, a doctrine that handed court scholars a sanctioned language in which to criticize a wayward emperor and handed the historian a frame in which every disaster was also a verdict. This is the same correlative imagination that the entry on China traces across the whole classical age; the Han is where it was systematized into state doctrine, and it underwrites much of the divinatory and medical tradition that followed, as well as the long afterlife of the Book of Changes as the master text of cosmic pattern.

The state cult that crowned this order was the service of Heaven, Tian, and the inheritance from the older Shang and Zhou ran straight through it: the emperor was Son of Heaven, holding the Mandate by virtue and forfeiting it by misrule, and the Han historians scoured the record of the fallen Qin — and, with more delicacy, of Wang Mang — for the signs by which Heaven had given notice. The dynasty also fixed the ritual year of imperial sacrifice, debated where and how the Son of Heaven should worship, and in time staged the Feng and Shan sacrifices at Mount Tai, the great ceremony in which a ruler reported the success of his reign to Heaven and Earth at the summit of the eastern marchmount.

The texts in the ground

What the Han wrote on perishable materials has mostly perished, but the dynasty buried its dead with libraries, and the tombs have begun to give them back. In 1973 archaeologists opened tomb three at Mawangdui, near Changsha in Hunan, sealed in 168 BCE, and recovered a cache of manuscripts written on silk: among them two copies of the Daodejing in an order reversed from the received text, otherwise-lost works of Huang-Lao political philosophy, medical and divinatory treatises, astronomical and military writings, and the earliest illustrated charts of physical-cultivation exercises — the deep substrate of the breath-and- body arts later traditions would elaborate. The Mawangdui silks (surveyed in detail) push the documentary history of several central texts back by centuries and show how fluid the canon still was when the Han began to fix it. Other Han finds — bamboo-strip legal codes, administrative dockets from the northwestern frontier garrisons, divination almanacs — have similarly turned a dynasty once known mostly from later histories into one of the best-documented periods of the ancient world. Behind the recovered texts stands the founding historian himself: Sima Qian, court astrologer and author of the Shiji, the Records of the Grand Historian, who in the Western Han gave Chinese civilization its first comprehensive history and set the form that every later dynastic history would follow.

When the Way acquired altars

The dynasty’s last century is also where organized religious Daoism enters the historical record. The philosophical Daoism of the Daodejing and the Zhuangzi — the contemplative current of the nameless Way and of wuwei, action so attuned to things as to look like doing nothing — was far older, the work of the Warring States centuries that preceded the empire. What the late Han added was institutions: an ordained clergy, a revealed covenant, a liturgy, and a governed community. The current treated under Taoism as the philosophical-classical stream and the current treated as daojiao, the organized religion, part company here, in the second century CE.

The first datable institution is the Way of the Celestial Masters, founded — by its own account — in 142 CE, when the deified Laozi (Taishang Laojun, the Most High Lord Lao) appeared to Zhang Daoling at Mount Heming in what is now Sichuan and granted him a covenant, the mengwei, naming him Celestial Master and binding a community to a celestial bureaucracy. By the end of the century his grandson Zhang Lu administered a working theocracy in the Hanzhong region, organized into twenty-four parishes, each under an officer called a libationer. The community kept a register of protective spirits issued to its initiates, a liturgy of confession in which sickness was understood as the outward sign of moral fault and healing as its remission, and a structure of mutual obligation that included charitable lodges for travelers. Zhang Lu surrendered his domain to the warlord Cao Cao in 215 CE, and the dispersal of his people across the empire seeded most of the institutional Daoism that came after — the tradition that would, in the centuries following the Han, receive the Shangqing and Lingbao revelations, assemble the great Daoist canon, and develop the inner-alchemical cultivation called neidan.

A parallel movement ran with darker political force. The Way of Great Peace, Taiping dao, gathered around the healer Zhang Jue in the eastern provinces and took its name and its program from the ideal of a coming taiping, a Great Peace, set out in a scripture of that name. Zhang Jue healed through confession and talismanic water, organized hundreds of thousands of followers into a network of districts, and taught that the Han had exhausted the Mandate of Heaven and that a new age was at hand. In 184 CE — a jiazi year, the first of the sixty-year cycle, chosen as the hinge of the cosmic turn — his followers rose in the Yellow Turban rebellion, named for the headcloths that marked them. The rising was crushed within the year, but the mobilization it forced — provincial governors and generals raising private armies to put it down — handed real power to the warlords who would dismember the dynasty, so that the movement that announced the end of the Mandate became one of the instruments of its withdrawal.

What scholarship can establish is the emergence of these communities, their officers, and their texts in the second century. What their adherents held was of another order and is rendered here on its own terms: that Laozi was a god who had descended to grant a covenant; that the cosmos was a bureaucracy that could be petitioned with written memorials, as one petitions a magistrate; that sickness was moral debt made flesh, and confession its settlement; and that the present age was old and sick and turning toward a renewal already written in the stars. These are the convictions on which a Chinese popular religion of petition, merit-ledgers, and a celestial chancery would later be built.

Scholarship and the textual record

The Han is unusually well served by both transmitted history and excavated document, and the modern reconstruction of it rests on the meeting of the two. The transmitted spine is the Shiji of Sima Qian and the Hanshu (Book of Han) of Ban Gu, completed in the first century CE, the model dynastic history of a single house; the Hou Hanshu covers the Eastern Han. The standard English synthesis remains the relevant volumes of The Cambridge History of China — volume 1, The Ch’in and Han Empires, 221 B.C.–A.D. 220, edited by Denis Twitchett and Michael Loewe (Cambridge, 1986), whose Cambridge Core record anchors the period’s institutional and political history; Loewe’s many studies of Han government, religion, and divination are the durable reference apparatus. The general frame of the dynasty’s chronology and institutions is set out in the Britannica account of the Han.

For the religious and intellectual currents the period seeded, the literature is deep. Dong Zhongshu’s correlative Confucianism is now available in a full critical English translation, John Major and Sarah Queen’s Luxuriant Gems of the Spring and Autumn (Columbia University Press, 2016), which supersedes the partial earlier renderings and makes the architecture of Han cosmological statecraft directly legible. The early religious Daoism of the Celestial Masters and the Way of Great Peace is the subject of a substantial modern scholarship — Anna Seidel’s study of the divinization of Laozi under the Han, Terry Kleeman’s Celestial Masters (Harvard, 2016), and the work of Stephen Bokenkamp and Gil Raz on the emergence of the tradition — all in copyright and cited rather than reproduced. The classical Daoist texts the Han inherited and the religion that later grew from them are accessible in the public-domain library through James Legge’s The Texts of Tâoism (Oxford, 1891), held in full in the Library, which carries the Daodejing, the Zhuangzi, and a cluster of the response-and-retribution tractates in which the confessional-moral logic of the Celestial Masters survives in later dress. The Way of Great Peace and its scripture are surveyed, with the documentary record of the rising, in the standard reference account of the Way of the Taiping.

The Han at the junction

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 first set into one configuration — a dynasty’s settlement in which the apparatus of empire, the authority of a fixed scripture, the reading of the cosmos as a web of resonances, and an organized priesthood of the Way were all made to occupy a single world at once.

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

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