I've noticed that a lot of posts in this thread revolve around the timing of various events in Chinese history. There are also certain suggestions that I have for China content that draw on historical events that I can't assume the average user here is familiar with. So for the next entry in my case for China (eventually), I present...
A Short Overview of China, 304 BC - 9 AD
Qin's Rise to Dominance
In the first post of this thread, I introduced the key states at the start date- Qin, Wei, Han, Zhao, Chu, Qi and Yan, plus their minor state and tribal neighbors. In Qin, King Zhaoxiang (personal name: Ying Ji) is in his early twenties and only a few years into his reign, which had been preceded by a bloody succession crisis and a major defeat at the hands of an anti-Qin alliance. With Qin in poor shape, conflict shifted back to Chu, the largest and most populous of the warring states, against a shifting alliance often centered around Wei or Qi. Under Zhaoxiang, Qin cunningly switched between supporting one side or the other in order to undermine major alliances and to gradually increase its territory. By the 270s Qin had become a dominant power and was advancing on all fronts, driving Chu out of their ancient capital in the southeast, breaking into the Central Plains and toppling the Zhou in the northeast, and conquering the Rong state of Yiqu to the west. When King Zhaoxiang died in 251 BC, Qin had already achieved a superpower status comparable to that of Rome's after the Second Punic War, ruling over roughly half of Warring States China. The other six states had succeeded in maintaining a balance of power amongst themselves at the price of allowing Qin's power to spiral out of control.
After two very brief reigns, Zhaoxiang's great-grandson King Zheng (personal name: Ying Zheng) assumed the throne at age 13 in 246 BC. After famously surviving an assassination attempt by Jing Ke (a story adapted, very loosely, into the movie Hero), he would unify the Warring States and proclaim himself Emperor before the age of 40. He ruled the Qin Empire for over a decade, launching savage preemptive attacks on the Xiongnu nomads and constructing massive public works, but after his death in 210 BC, the Qin court once again disintegrated into infighting and succession struggles, and at the same time a general revolt broke out across the empire. Commoners rose up against heavy tax and labor duties, and former nobles of the old states proclaimed their own kingdoms.
Liu Bang and the Early Han Empire
The most important warlords to rise up out of these rebellions were both Southerners from Chu, but came from opposite class backgrounds. Liu Bang, who would go on to found the Han state, was a commoner who had only ever held a minor local office. His ally-turned-enemy, Xiang Yu, was a scion of the Chu high aristocracy, born into a line of hereditary generals. When the Qin capital was taken in 206 BC and the dynasty officially toppled, Xiang Yu held the upper hand, and true to his noble background he set about re-establishing a patchwork of kingdoms with himself as
bawang- hegemon or overking- and other nobles and ministers as local rulers. This arrangement is referred to as "the Eighteen Kingdoms" in later scholarship.
Liu Bang, being an important warlord but also a peasant and an erstwhile threat to Xiang Yu, was given a state to rule in the remote west of China, where Xiang hoped he would not cause much trouble (this kingdom was centered on the Han river valley between modern Sichuan and Shaanxi, hence the name "Han"). Unfortunately for Xiang, the Eighteen Kingdoms exploded into open war almost immediately as the ambitious new kings turned on each other. Before long it was down to just Liu Bang and Xiang Yu themselves. In 202 BC, the same year as the Battle of Zama in Africa, Liu crushed Xiang's forces at Gaixia. The wounded Xiang committed suicide and the victorious Liu declared a new empire: the Han.
In setting up his dynasty, Liu Bang took a lesson from the failure of Xiang Yu's eighteen kingdoms: if you were going to grant others lands of their own, you need to be sure to keep enough for yourself to maintain your military and political dominance over them. He chose to rule as
huangdi or emperor, as King Zheng had, rather than as
bawang or overking like Xiang Yu, founding the new capital Chang'an near the old Qin capital and establishing a centralized bureaucracy accountable directly to him. But he also saw the need to reward the generals and ministers who had carried him to victory in the wars against Qin and Chu. To satisfy them, he carved the eastern part of China- prosperous and cultured, but relatively weak militarily- into vassal states for them to rule, while holding the strategic western part for himself. The system worked, and Liu Bang and his successors were able to gradually split up and rein in the vassal kingdoms until they became provinces by another name.
Where Liu Bang's policy was less successful was in dealing with the nomads. Following their brush with the united Qin Empire in 215 BC, the Xiongnu peoples had come together in a powerful steppe confederation under Modu Chanyu (also known as Maodun). Modu expanded this confederation into a true nomadic empire, the first of its kind, during the post-Qin years of civil war in China, bringing all the nomads between the Pamirs and the Liao River under his rule and launching ever-larger raids into what was now Han territory. When Liu Bang led a large counterattack into Xiongnu lands, Modu's army isolated and surrounded them, utterly destroying the Han army at the Battle of Baideng in 200 BC. Liu Bang barely escaped with his life, in a rout that presaged Crassus's disaster at Carrhae a century and a half later.
After this catastrophe, Liu Bang could only choose appeasement. Han instituted the heqin or "harmonious intermarriage" policy, buying the Xiongnu Chanyus off with Liu princesses and annual tributes. The infantry-based levied army inherited from Warring States models simply wasn't effective at either resisting nomadic raids or at defeating their armies in open battle and it would take generations for a new Han army to emerge.
Emperor Wu and the Han's Critical Age
After Liu Bang's death, the Han state was nominally ruled by a series of weak emperors while Liu Bang's wife and her Lü clansmen actually controlled the court. The first emperor to rule without the overbearing influence of the Lü clan, Emperor Wen ( lpersonal name: Liu Heng, reigned 180-157 BC) was a diligent administrator who slashed taxes and labor duties, scrupulously managed the state's budgets and stockpiles, and instituted the earliest form of appointment-by-examination. His successor Emperor Jing (Liu Qi, reigned 157-141 BC) followed suit, and the relative peace, political stability, and good governance of these decades led to extensive economic growth across the empire.
Emperor Wu (Liu Che, 141-87 BC) brought about a new era for the empire. Where his predecessors had favored a Daoist-influenced, minimalist approach to government, Emperor Wu wanted an activist policy towards economic, military and diplomatic affairs. Where Wen and Jing's lax policy had allowed the power of local elites to expand, Wu brought back central control. As part of his new approach to rule, Emperor Wu also endorsed a Confucian philosophy of government even while looking to Legalist precedents as models for specific policies- this combination would come to dominate Chinese political practice for millennia.
65 years after Liu Bang's defeat by the Xiongnu, Emperor Wu was the first Han ruler to turn the tables on them. From 135 BC onwards, Wu repudiated the heqin intermarriage policy and launched an all-out offensive against the Xiongnu empire. At great expense, the Han state built up a true cavalry army capable of operating for long stretches on the steppes, and over years of bloody and costly fighting they succeeded in breaking the back of Xiongnu power. By 119 BC Han forces had annexed the Hexi Corridor in Gansu, enclosed the rich pastureland of the Ordos region, and driven the Xiongnu north of the Gobi Desert. This ushered in a new era of trade and diplomacy between Han and Central Asia, the beginnings of the Silk Road.
Wu's conquests also took in China's southern borderlands as far as northern Vietnam, as well as parts of the Korean peninsula. The price of this expansionism was a series of major tax hikes which strained the agrarian economy. The registered population fell as people sought to evade enrollment and thereby dodge taxes, further straining the imperial treasury. Wu also became increasingly paranoid and despotic as his reign went on, conducting several bloody purges and, most famously, sentencing the historian Sima Qian to castration for speaking in defense of a purged general. The later part of his reign was marked by peasant unrest and by violence in the capital.
*
Although Wu's reign ultimately ended in overreach abroad and tyranny at home, he had reshaped China and its place in the world permanently. His conquests had brought all of what we now consider "China Proper" under Han rule; he established permanent diplomatic relations with Central Asia and Iran; he broke the power of the Xiongnu Empire; he turned the oasis states of the Tarim Basin into Han satellites. In the long term, he also unwittingly laid the groundwork for the rise of Confucian scholars as the dominant political class in China.
*A note on the map: the green line marks the maximum extent of the Xiongnu Empire. Light orange marks Han territory at the start of Han Wudi's reign; darker orange marks territorial gains. The brown region in the Tarim basin indicates vassal states.
The Liu Clan Loses Control
The emperors immediately after Wu tended again towards moderation and a light touch, relaxing the burdens on the populace while investing heavily in the state's legitimacy and cultural prestige. The economy not only recovered but flourished, with the nomadic threat greatly reduced, new farmlands opened, and trade routes expanded and deepened. But like the Lü clan during and after the reign of Liu Bang, the imperial consort clans once again started to extend their control over court affairs.
Starting from the reign of Emperor Yuan (Liu Shi, 48-33 BC), the clansmen of Empress Wang gradually extended their reach, with some gaining high appointments through their close connection to the emperor, then helping their friends and relatives to climb into the middle ranks beneath them. Many of these Wang ministers served ably and responsibly, but their growing network undermined the authority of the Liu imperial house while threatening the political prospects of the traditional nobility and the professional bureaucrats.
Things came to a head under Emperor Cheng (Liu Ao, 33-7 BC). Only periodically interested in matters of state, Cheng would sneak out of the palace disguised as a commoner to enjoy the city life in Chang'an, eventually taking a dancing girl from the city, and her sister, as concubines. He placed great trust in his uncles and cousins in the Wang clan, ennobling several of them, granting them high civil and military offices, and generally deferring to them on policy. Cheng raised Wang Mang, a distant cousin, to the highest imperial office in 8 BC, then promptly died of a stroke.
Wang Mang became regent for the underage Emperor Ping in 1 BC, and used his newfound power to drive all opposition out of the capital and lay the groundwork for his eventual usurpation. A learned man, Wang fabricated omens and prophecies that showed the Han was reaching its natural end and that he was Heaven's chosen successor in order to smooth over the coming transition. In the end, it came down to murder- Wang Mang poisoned the young Emperor Ping and, after a brief period as "acting emperor," he formally abolished the Han and proclaimed his new Xin state in 9 AD. The house of Liu had fallen.
