For over two thousand years, Chinese history moved through a rhythm of unification, flourishing, decline, and renewal — a succession of dynasties that shaped East Asia.
Stop 01 · 221–206 BCE
The First Emperor
In 221 BCE the state of Qin conquered its last rivals, and its king, Ying Zheng, declared himself Qin Shi Huang, First Emperor of a unified China. With his minister Li Si he divided the realm into 36 commanderies under appointed officials and standardised writing, weights and measures, coinage and even the length of cart axles. He built roads, joined earlier state walls into the first Great Wall, and is traditionally said to have burned books and executed scholars. He died on tour in 210 BCE; revolts followed, and in 206 BCE the rebel Xiang Yu burned the capital, Xianyang. The dynasty was brutal and brief, but the idea of a single unified China endured.
In 221 BCE the state of Qin conquered its last rivals, and its king, Ying Zheng, declared himself Qin Shi Huang, First Emperor of a unified China. With his minister Li Si he divided the realm into 36 commanderies under appointed officials and standardised writing, weights and measures, coinage and even the length of cart axles. He built roads, joined earlier state walls into the first Great Wall, and is traditionally said to have burned books and executed scholars. He died on tour in 210 BCE; revolts followed, and in 206 BCE the rebel Xiang Yu burned the capital, Xianyang. The dynasty was brutal and brief, but the idea of a single unified China endured.
From the wars after Qin's fall, Liu Bang emerged victorious and founded the Han dynasty (202 BCE–220 CE), which gave China four centuries of stability, Confucian government and expansion, broken only by Wang Mang's usurpation from 9 to 23 CE. Emperor Wu (141–87 BCE) made Confucianism the court's official teaching and sent armies against the nomadic Xiongnu. His envoy Zhang Qian, who set out west in 138 BCE and spent 13 years as a Xiongnu captive, brought back knowledge of Central Asia, and Han control of the Hexi Corridor opened the Silk Road. A census of 2 CE counted about 57.7 million people, rivalling Rome. Han China so defined Chinese identity that the majority ethnic group still calls itself 'Han'.
Han power crumbled amid court intrigue and revolt. The Yellow Turban Rebellion broke out in 184, and warlords carved up the empire. In the winter of 208 the warlords Sun Quan and Liu Bei defeated Cao Cao at Red Cliffs on the Yangtze, where fire ships set his fleet ablaze, ending his hopes of conquering the south. In 220 Cao Cao's son Cao Pi deposed the last Han emperor, and three states, Wei, Shu and Wu, fought over the realm. The Jin dynasty reunited China in 280, but civil war and the rise of northern states drove its court south to Jiankang, today's Nanjing, in 317. Rival northern and southern dynasties ruled until 589, while Buddhism and Taoism spread widely.
After centuries of division, the short-lived Sui dynasty reunified China in 589 and built the Grand Canal linking north and south, but fell after failed wars against Goguryeo in Korea. Its successor, the Tang dynasty (618–907), presided over a cultural golden age. Poetry, Buddhism and trade flourished: Li Bai and Du Fu wrote their verse, the monk Xuanzang brought Sanskrit texts home from a 17-year journey to India, and woodblock printing developed. The capital Chang'an, with perhaps 800,000 to a million people inside its walls around 750, drew merchants and pilgrims from across Asia. Tang China was confident, open and immensely influential on Korea and Japan, until the An Lushan rebellion of 755–763 left central power permanently weakened.
In 960 a general, Zhao Kuangyin, seized the throne and founded the Song dynasty (960–1279), which reunited most of China from its capital at Kaifeng. It was an age of invention: gunpowder weapons such as fire arrows, bombs and the fire lance, the magnetic compass for navigation, movable-type printing in the 11th century, and the world's first paper money. China's population doubled between the 10th and 11th centuries, and its cities were the largest and most sophisticated on earth. Yet militarily it was pressed hard by northern peoples: in 1127 the Jurchen Jin sacked Kaifeng and carried off two emperors, and the court fled south to Hangzhou. The Southern Song held out until the Mongols finally overwhelmed it.
Having destroyed the Jurchen Jin by 1234, the Mongols turned on the Song. Kublai Khan, a grandson of Genghis Khan, proclaimed the dynastic name Great Yuan in 1271, a phrase from the I Ching, and ruled from Dadu, today's Beijing. His armies took Xiangyang after a long siege in 1273 and in 1279 crushed the last Song loyalists at sea off Yamen. China was reunited under the first non-Han dynasty to rule all of it. Kublai welcomed foreigners such as Marco Polo but ranked his subjects in classes with southern Chinese at the bottom, and his invasions of Japan failed in 1274 and 1281. From 1351 the Red Turban rebellions spread, and in 1368 the Mongols withdrew north.
After a century of Mongol Yuan rule, the Ming dynasty (1368–1644) restored native Chinese government. Its founder, the Hongwu Emperor, was Zhu Yuanzhang, born into a peasant family in 1328, orphaned, briefly a novice monk and then a Red Turban rebel commander. His son the Yongle Emperor moved the capital to Beijing, built the Forbidden City between 1406 and 1420, and in the early 1400s sent Admiral Zheng He's vast treasure fleets across the Indian Ocean as far as Arabia and East Africa. Later emperors rebuilt the Great Wall in the form we know today. American crops and silver fed growth, to perhaps 160 million people by 1600, but in 1644 rebels under Li Zicheng captured Beijing.
As the Ming collapsed, the general Wu Sangui opened the Shanhai Pass of the Great Wall to the Manchus, who routed Li Zicheng's rebels in May 1644 and made Beijing the capital of their Qing dynasty (1644–1912). Han Chinese men were ordered to wear the Manchu queue hairstyle on pain of death, and resistance was not crushed until 1683. Under the Kangxi Emperor (1661–1722) and the Qianlong Emperor (1735–1796), the Manchu-led Qing built China's largest territorial empire, about 14.7 million square kilometres by 1790 and roughly the shape of the country today, from the Mongolian Plateau to the South China Sea. But 19th-century pressures, the Opium Wars, rebellions and foreign encroachment, would erode it.
Victory in the First Opium War (1839–1842) let Britain impose the Treaty of Nanking, opening five treaty ports and taking Hong Kong Island. The Taiping Rebellion (1850–1864), led by Hong Xiuquan, who proclaimed himself the younger brother of Jesus, and the Dungan Revolt killed over 20 million people. Defeat by Japan in 1894–1895 cost China Taiwan. On 10 October 1911 New Army soldiers rose at Wuchang, and revolt spread. On 1 January 1912 the Republic of China was proclaimed with Sun Yat-sen as president, and after Yuan Shikai, the Qing prime minister, brokered a deal, the six-year-old emperor Puyi abdicated on 12 February, ending the 267-year Qing reign and a dynastic system that had lasted two millennia.