Chinese History: every dynasty, thinker and turning point, from oracle bones to today

The sage kings and the Xia: tradition and the Erlitou debate (c. 2070 to 1600 BC by the modern Chronology Project (older traditional reckoning 2205 to 1766 BC); existence debated)

Later texts, including the Book of Documents, the Bamboo Annals and Sima Qian's Shiji, describe the Xia as China's first dynasty, founded by Yu the Great after the age of the Yellow Emperor and the sage kings Yao and Shun. These stories are tradition, written down long after the events they describe. The dates 2070 to 1600 BC were proposed by the Xia-Shang-Zhou Chronology Project, commissioned by the Chinese government in 1996. A majority of Chinese archaeologists identify the Xia with the Erlitou culture of about 1900 to 1500 BC (radiocarbon work since 2007 narrows it to about 1750 to 1500 BC) in the Yellow River valley, while many other scholars, especially in the West, regard the dynasty as legendary or unproven. No site has yet identified itself as Xia in writing, and the same remains could be read as early Shang.

• In the traditional story, Yu's father Gun spent nine years failing to hold back the floods with dykes, and Yu succeeded him; the World History Encyclopedia retells this as legend.
• Sarah Allan has argued that the Xia of myth is a mirror image of the Shang, with moons, water, dragons and death set against suns, sky, birds and life, later reinterpreted by the Zhou as a real dynasty.
• One sceptical argument holds that the Zhou and later dynasties needed an earlier house that had lost its right to rule through bad conduct, a pattern that justified their own takeover.

Sources: World History Encyclopedia: Xia Dynasty; Wikipedia: Xia dynasty; World History Encyclopedia: Shang Dynasty; Columbia University, Asia for Educators: Timeline of Chinese Dynasties

The ritual bronzes (from c. 1650 BC; at their height under the Shang and early Zhou)

From about 1650 BC elaborately decorated bronze vessels were made for offering food and drink to ancestors and spirits, then often buried with their owners. Ceremonies were treated as banquets shared by the living and the dead, usually in family temples or halls over tombs. Founders used piece-mould casting, in which a clay mould was made in sections, fired and reassembled, a method that lasted until the Han. Production was probably controlled by the ruler at first, who gave metal to nobles as a mark of favour. Single royal tombs have yielded more than 200 pieces.

• The Houmuwu ding, a Shang vessel, is described as the largest ancient bronze ever found.
• Fu Hao's tomb alone held 468 bronze objects, including 130 weapons and 23 bells, a measure of how much metal a Shang royal could command.
• Many vessels were larger, grander versions of everyday pots and were probably not used for ordinary meals; the same shapes also survive in pottery.

Sources: Wikipedia: Chinese ritual bronzes; University of Washington, A Visual Sourcebook of Chinese Civilization: Fu Hao's Tomb; World History Encyclopedia: Shang Dynasty

The Shang dynasty and its capital at Yinxu (c. 1600 to 1046 BC; Yin as capital c. 1250 to 1046 BC, with earlier settlement from c. 1300 BC)

The Shang are the earliest Chinese dynasty known from their own written records. The Book of Documents and the Bamboo Annals put King Pan Geng's final move at Yin, near modern Anyang in Henan; Sima Qian instead has him move to Bo. The UNESCO-listed site covers 414 hectares, and excavations have uncovered more than 80 rammed-earth foundations, including palaces, shrines, tombs and workshops. Excavations have revealed eleven major royal tombs along with animals and people sacrificed in state rituals. Shang writings name most human victims as war captives, largely Qiang people from the northwest.

• Chariot pits at Yinxu hold some of the earliest animal-drawn carts yet found in China, and burials there include human sacrifices and bronzes.
• A Shang city found at Zhengzhou in the early 1950s (1951 or 1952, by source) had rammed-earth walls estimated at 8 to 10 m high and 20 m wide at the base, with a perimeter of about 7 km; the writer Justin Wintle, quoted by the World History Encyclopedia, puts its building at 12,000 men working for ten years.
• Histories written long after his fall say the last king, Di Xin, killed himself after defeat by the Zhou.

Sources: Wikipedia: Yinxu; World History Encyclopedia: Shang Dynasty; Wikipedia: Shang dynasty; Columbia University, Asia for Educators: Timeline of Chinese Dynasties; Wikipedia: Erligang culture

The oracle bones (inscribed bones c. 1250 to 1046 BC; recognised as writing in 1899)

Oracle bones are ox shoulder blades and turtle undershells used for divination in the late Shang. A diviner drilled the prepared bone, applied heat until it cracked and read the result, and questions and answers were often carved onto it. Diviners asked about weather, crops, the health of the royal family and war, and the inscriptions are the earliest large body of Chinese writing. Scholars count around 5,000 different characters, though some may be variants of one another, and only about 1,200 are agreed with certainty. Scientific digs between 1928 and 1937, with Dong Zuobin supervising the first and Li Ji directing the later ones, recovered about 20,000 pieces, roughly a fifth of the total now known.

• For generations villagers around Anyang sold the bones as 'dragon bones' to be ground into medicine. The scholar Wang Yirong recognised them as ancient writing in 1899; a popular version has him finding them in his malaria prescription, while another says a dealer sold them to him.
• The Canadian missionary James Mellon Menzies built the largest private collection, more than 35,000 pieces, and was among the first to excavate and study the bones scientifically.
• The University of Washington's sourcebook notes that the king did not address the high god Di directly; he asked his ancestors to act as go-betweens.

Sources: World History Encyclopedia: Oracle Bones; Wikipedia: Oracle bone; University of Washington, A Visual Sourcebook of Chinese Civilization: Fu Hao's Tomb

Fu Hao (died c. 1200 BC (her tomb is also dated c. 1250 BC); birth unknown)

Fu Hao (also read Fu Zi), temple name Mu Xin, Consort, general and priestess · Shang dynasty, Anyang

Fu Hao was a consort of King Wu Ding, named in oracle bone inscriptions both as a commander and as a presider over major sacrifices. She is known almost entirely from those inscriptions and from her tomb, not from later histories. Zheng Zhenxiang excavated the tomb at Yinxu in 1976, and the University of Washington's sourcebook calls it the only tomb of a Shang royal family member found unlooted. The pit is modest, 5.6 m by 4 m at the mouth, but it held 468 bronzes, 755 jades, 564 bone objects and 6,900 cowrie shells. Six dogs and 16 people were buried with her.

How they rose: She entered the royal household as one of the many wives of King Wu Ding, who is said to have married women from neighbouring peoples to build alliances (a total of 64 wives is given). She became one of his three principal consorts.

How they died: The cause is unknown. She died before Wu Ding, who is said to have had her ritually married after her death to three great kings of the past; her temple name was Mu Xin.

• Inscriptions credit her with defeating the Tufang, long-standing enemies of the Shang, in a single battle, and with campaigns against the Yi, Qiang and Ba; one source puts her command at up to 13,000 soldiers.
• Her weapons included great battle-axes, which are taken, together with the inscriptions, as confirmation of her unusual military role.
• Oracle bones show Wu Ding repeatedly asking about her health and her childbirth, a rare personal glimpse of a Shang royal marriage. She also controlled an estate of her own.

Sources: University of Washington, A Visual Sourcebook of Chinese Civilization: Fu Hao's Tomb; Wikipedia: Yinxu; Wikipedia: Fu Hao; EBSCO Research Starters: Fu Hao's Tomb

The Zhou conquest and the Mandate of Heaven (c. 1046 BC, by the chronology adopted in China; older estimates vary)

King Wu of Zhou defeated the last Shang king, Di Xin, at the Battle of Muye and founded the longest-lasting dynasty in Chinese history. To justify this the Zhou taught that Heaven appoints a ruler for the good of the people and withdraws its Mandate from a ruler who fails them. The idea made disaster into a political verdict, since floods and droughts could be read as signs of lost favour. Later writers presented King Wen, Wu's father, as the model ruler, and said his moral credit made the conquest possible. Later rulers and emperors went on claiming the same divine authority.

• Before the Xia-Shang-Zhou Chronology Project settled on about 1046 BC, scholars had proposed at least 44 different dates for the battle, from 1130 to 1018 BC.
• Accounts of the conquest differ sharply. The Yi Zhou Shu describes prisoners, massacres and King Wu shooting at and cutting Di Xin's body after he had burned himself, while other traditions make it a moral victory over a tyrant.
• A rare conjunction of the five major planets in 1059 BC was later read as a sign of Heaven's favour toward King Wen.

Sources: World History Encyclopedia: Mandate of Heaven; Wikipedia: Battle of Muye; World History Encyclopedia: Zhou Dynasty; Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Mencius (Mengzi); James Legge, trans. (1879), Sacred Books of the East vol. 3: The Shu King, Shih King and Hsiao King (Wikisource)

The Duke of Zhou (regent c. 1042 to 1035 BC; birth and death dates unknown)

Ji Dan, Zhou Gong, posthumously Duke Wen of Zhou, Regent · Western Zhou dynasty, Zongzhou and Chengzhou

The Duke of Zhou was the brother of King Wu, who died soon after conquering the Shang and left a young son, King Cheng. Acting as regent, he issued edicts in the king's name, and his brothers the Lords of Guan and Cai accused him of usurping the throne. They joined Wu Geng, son of the last Shang king, in a rebellion that took three years to put down. He then gave much of the land to kinsmen and allies of the Ji clan and moved Shang loyalists far from the centre. He also established a second capital in the east at Chengzhou, near modern Luoyang.

How they rose: He was a son of King Wen and a brother of King Wu, and he advised the Zhou house before and during the conquest of the Shang. When Wu died he took the regency for the young King Cheng.

How they died: After the new capital was consecrated he returned the royal seals to King Cheng and withdrew. He was buried at Bi near Zongzhou; the date and cause of his death are unknown.

• The 'Metal-Bound Coffer' story is told in different ways: in the Book of Documents the Duke prays for the sick King Wu, while Chinaknowledge's summary has Wu ordering him to take the throne and the Duke storing the order in a golden coffer. Both are tradition, not documented events.
• Tradition credits him with authorship of the I Ching and the Classic of Poetry and with establishing the Rites of Zhou; these attributions are not established fact.
• His eldest son received the state of Lu, the home of Confucius, while his second son kept the fief of Zhou, and Confucians venerated him as ancestor of the Lu house. Chinaknowledge instead assigns Lu to the younger line.

Sources: Chinaknowledge (U. Theobald): Zhou Gong, the Duke of Zhou; Wikipedia: Duke of Zhou; World History Encyclopedia: Zhou Dynasty; World History Encyclopedia: Mandate of Heaven

The Book of Songs (Shijing) (poems from the 11th to the 7th centuries BC)

The Classic of Poetry, also called the Shijing or Book of Songs, is the oldest surviving collection of Chinese poetry, with 305 works dated from the 11th to the 7th centuries BC. Alongside court hymns and ritual songs it preserves 160 'Airs' arranged by the regional state they came from. Tradition says Confucius edited it, and it became one of the Five Classics, studied and memorised across East Asia for more than two thousand years. Its rhymes are still used by scholars to reconstruct how Old Chinese sounded.

• In James Legge's translation of the Analects (1861, revised 1893), Confucius sums up the collection as 'Having no depraved thoughts.'
• A final group of five 'Eulogies of Shang' claims to preserve Shang ritual songs but is generally considered much later than that.
• For six further titles only the names survive, the texts having been lost.

Sources: Wikipedia: Classic of Poetry; Chinaknowledge (U. Theobald): Shijing; James Legge, trans. (1879), Sacred Books of the East vol. 3: The Shu King, Shih King and Hsiao King (Wikisource); James Legge, trans. (1861, revised 1893): The Analects of Confucius, from The Chinese Classics (Project Gutenberg)

The fall of the Western Zhou and the legend of Bao Si (771 BC; move to Luoyang follows)

In 771 BC an alliance of the Marquis of Shen and Quanrong warriors killed King You and ended the Western Zhou. King You had set aside Queen Shen and her son in favour of his concubine Bao Si and her son, and the queen's father took revenge. The court moved east to Luoyang, beginning the Eastern Zhou, in which the king steadily lost power to the regional lords. Scholars call the first part of this era the Spring and Autumn period, after a chronicle of the state of Lu.

• The famous tale says King You lit the warning beacons on Mount Li to make Bao Si laugh, so that the lords did not come when the attack was real. This is a legend: warning beacons are not attested before the Han, and Professor Liu Guozhong of Tsinghua University considers the story invented.
• The Lüshi Chunqiu tells a version in which drums, not beacons, summoned the armies.
• The Tsinghua bamboo slips give a less romantic sequence: King You attacked the Marquis of Shen, who allied with the Quanrong and defeated him.

Sources: Wikipedia: Bao Si; World History Encyclopedia: Zhou Dynasty; Columbia University, Asia for Educators: Timeline of Chinese Dynasties

Laozi (traditionally 6th century BC; historicity doubted)

Laozi (Lao-tzu), also called Lao Dan and in Sima Qian Li Er, Philosopher (possibly legendary) · traditionally Zhou dynasty, state of Chu

Laozi means 'Old Master', a title rather than a personal name. Nearly everything told of him comes from Sima Qian, who says he was a native of Chu and a keeper of records at the Zhou court. Tradition makes him a senior contemporary of Confucius, but many modern scholars see the Laozi or Daodejing as a work of several hands. In religious Daoism he came to be worshipped as a supreme deity. The book teaches a way of living in harmony with the Dao, the force behind all things, through simplicity and non-striving.

How they rose: Unknown. Sima Qian's account makes him a learned official who kept the Zhou archives, but scholars including Fung Yu-lan have argued that Sima Qian merged more than one person.

How they died: Unknown. Legend says he simply left across the border and was not seen again.

• Sima Qian tells how, leaving the declining Zhou, he met the border official Yin Xi, who persuaded him to write down his teaching. This is legend.
• Two silk copies found at Mawangdui in 1973, one probably copied before 195 BC, and an older bamboo-slip text from Guodian in Hubei have reopened debate about how the book was formed.
• In James Legge's 1891 translation the book opens: 'The Tao that can be trodden is not the enduring and unchanging Tao.'

Sources: Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Laozi; Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Laozi; World History Encyclopedia: Lao-Tzu; James Legge, trans. (1891), Sacred Books of the East vol. 39: The Tao Teh King (Project Gutenberg)

Confucius (traditionally c. 551 to 479 BC)

Kong Qiu, Kongzi (Master Kong), Teacher and philosopher · Spring and Autumn period, state of Lu

Confucius, Master Kong, served the small state of Lu, in modern Shandong province, as the Zhou order was breaking down. Very little is firmly known about him, because all the sources were written at least decades after his traditional lifetime. The Analects, the chief source of his sayings, was compiled by later followers, and scholars disagree about how much of it reflects him. He taught that good government rests on moral example, ritual and family duty, and described himself as a transmitter of old ways rather than a creator. His stature grew after his death, and under the Han he became an object of worship in schools.

How they rose: Born in Lu to a father from a noble clan, he held office there and is said to have been Director of Public Works and of Justice around 500 BC. He left to travel among the states seeking a ruler who would adopt his ideas, then returned to teach.

How they died: He died about 479 BC; the cause is unknown. His followers carried on his teaching, and his fame grew during the Warring States and Han.

• In James Legge's translation of the Analects (1861, revised 1893) he says, 'What you do not want done to yourself, do not do to others.'
• Sima Qian's first biography credits him with 72 disciples and with high offices in Lu, including acting chancellor, which the Stanford Encyclopedia treats as part of the traditional picture.
• A later story says he was held for five days by mistake and calmly played a stringed instrument until the error was found.

Sources: Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Confucius; Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Confucius; World History Encyclopedia: Confucius; James Legge, trans. (1861, revised 1893): The Analects of Confucius, from The Chinese Classics (Project Gutenberg); Columbia University, Asia for Educators: Timeline of Chinese Dynasties

Sunzi (Sun Tzu) (traditionally 544 to 496 BC; historicity disputed)

Sun Wu, courtesy name Changqing; Sunzi (Master Sun), Military writer · Spring and Autumn period, state of Wu

Sunzi, or Sun Wu, is the traditional author of The Art of War, a short treatise in thirteen chapters on strategy and deception. The earliest account of him is a brief biography in the Shiji of around 97 BC, which makes him a native of Qi who served King Helu of Wu. Scholars doubt it: Mair calls the biography essentially fictional, and the earliest parts of the book probably date at least a century after Sunzi's supposed death. Whoever wrote it, the text has been read by soldiers and rulers ever since.

How they rose: According to the Shiji, King Helu of Wu heard of his book, tested him by asking him to train the palace women, and made him a general. The story cannot be confirmed.

How they died: Unknown; 496 BC is only the traditional date.

• Sima Qian's best-known story has Sunzi drilling 180 palace women for the king, beheading the two royal favourites who laughed at his orders, and then seeing the rest obey at once. It is a story, not a record.
• Bamboo slips including the Art of War were found in a tomb at Yinqueshan, Shandong, in 1972, along with a work by his supposed descendant Sun Bin.
• In Lionel Giles's 1910 translation the text says, 'All warfare is based on deception.'

Sources: Wikipedia: Sun Tzu; World History Encyclopedia: Sun-Tzu; Lionel Giles, trans. (1910): The Art of War (Project Gutenberg)

The Warring States (475 to 221 BC by Sima Qian's dating; 481, 453 and 403 BC are also used)

As Zhou power collapsed, nearly 100 small states were absorbed into seven major ones: Chu, Han, Qi, Qin, Wei, Yan and Zhao, whose rulers each declared themselves king. Mass conscription replaced aristocratic chariot warfare, and iron swords, crossbows and cavalry made battle far deadlier. The World History Encyclopedia gives armies of over 200,000 infantry and 358 wars between 535 and 286 BC. The same pressure drove better iron tools, drained marshes and irrigation canals, and it helped give rise to the rival philosophies of the Hundred Schools. Qin finished the conquest of its rivals in 221 BC.

• States built long defensive walls against one another, centuries before any unified Great Wall; a stretch of the Qi wall in Shandong still stands 4 m high in places.
• Qin soldiers could rise through a ladder of 20 ranks, and one enemy head could win promotion and about 5 acres of land.
• For the campaign at Changping, Qin is said to have called up every male over the age of 15, though this seems to have been unusual.

Sources: World History Encyclopedia: Warring States Period; Wikipedia: Warring States period; Columbia University, Asia for Educators: Timeline of Chinese Dynasties; World History Encyclopedia: Legalism

The bells of Marquis Yi of Zeng (buried no earlier than 433 BC; excavated 1978)

Marquis Yi ruled the small state of Zeng, then under the domination of Chu, and his four-chambered tomb in Hubei was excavated in 1978. The University of Washington's sourcebook lists 124 musical instruments, 134 bronze vessels and household items, 5,012 pieces of lacquerware and 6,696 characters written on bamboo slips. The central chamber seems to have been a ceremonial hall with the bells at its heart. Its 65 chime bells cover all the semitones across five and a half octaves, according to the Hubei Provincial Museum. They are displayed today in that museum in Wuhan.

• Each bell can sound two different tones, three degrees apart.
• The largest bell stands 153.4 cm high and weighs 203.6 kg, and the racks holding the set run to 7.48 m on one side.
• Eight young women were buried in coffins near the marquis and 13 more in the western chamber, and a dog was given its own coffin.

Sources: University of Washington, A Visual Sourcebook of Chinese Civilization: Marquis Yi's Tomb; Wikipedia: Bianzhong of Marquis Yi of Zeng; Hubei Provincial Museum on Google Arts and Culture: The Marquis Yi of Zeng, Bronze Objects

Shang Yang (c. 390 to 338 BC)

Gongsun Yang, also Wei Yang, Lord of Shang, Statesman · Warring States, state of Qin

Shang Yang was a nobleman of the small state of Wey who found no opening in the state of Wei and went to Qin. He reached Qin around 361 BC, and his first reforms under Duke Xiao are dated 359 or 356 BC by source, organising families into groups of five and ten that were legally responsible for one another. He abolished the privileges of hereditary nobility and gave rank and land for success in war, using a ladder of 20 ranks. He rewarded farmers who exceeded their quotas, encouraged cultivation of wasteland, oversaw the building of Xianyang and brought in a second set of reforms in 350 BC. The World History Encyclopedia credits him with the methods of total war that let Qin defeat the other states.

How they rose: Serving under Wei's chief minister, he was passed over by King Hui and moved to Qin, whose ruler was seeking able men. His argument for strengthening the state won him a high rank and the power to reform.

How they died: When Duke Xiao died in 338 BC, the new ruler, later King Huiwen, whose teachers Shang Yang had once had punished, had him arrested and torn apart by chariots. His family was wiped out under his own law, but most of his system remained.

• His penal law was notorious for punishing even minor crimes severely.
• The Book of Lord Shang carries his name, but scholars think it is the work of both Shang Yang and later followers.
• Members of the royal house were subject to the same rules as commoners, and his chief enemies came from among the nobles who lost their privileges.

Sources: Chinaknowledge (U. Theobald): Shang Yang; Wikipedia: Shang Yang; Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Legalism in Chinese Philosophy; World History Encyclopedia: Legalism

Mencius (traditionally 372 to 289 BC)

Meng Ke, Mengzi (Master Meng), Confucian philosopher · Warring States, Zou and Qi

Mencius, or Mengzi, was the most influential early follower of Confucius. He is said to have been born in the state of Zou in modern Shandong and to have studied under Confucius's grandson Zisi, though most modern scholars doubt this. He travelled between courts urging kings to rule through benevolence rather than force, with little success. The Mengzi, recording his teachings and dialogues, argues that human nature has sprouts of goodness that can be nurtured. Encounters with rulers recorded in the book can be dated between 323 and 314 BC.

How they rose: Tradition says he was raised by his widowed mother and educated in the school of Zisi. He gained standing as a teacher and adviser and held office in the state of Qi, probably no more than an honorary title.

How they died: Unknown. He left public life disappointed in the rulers he had advised, and tradition has him dying among his students about 289 BC.

• His best-known argument is a thought experiment: anyone who suddenly saw a child about to fall into a well would feel alarm and compassion, and not for any reward.
• He proposed the 'well-field' system, in which a village's land is divided into nine equal plots like the character for 'well', with eight families jointly working the central one as their tax.
• A legend says his mother moved house three times, from a graveyard to a market to a school, to find the right influences for him. It became a Chinese proverb.

Sources: Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Mencius; Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Mencius (Mengzi); World History Encyclopedia: Mencius

Qu Yuan (c. 340 to 278 BC)

Qu Yuan, Poet and minister · Warring States, state of Chu

Qu Yuan was a poet and official of the southern state of Chu, and he is the central figure of the anthology known as the Chuci, or Songs of the South. The earliest mention is Jia Yi's lament of 174 BC; the first full biography, Sima Qian's, contradicts itself and may be coloured by Sima's sympathy for another man punished by his ruler. Most scholars now accept that a minister called Qu Yuan existed but credit him with only the Li Sao or a small part of the anthology. It says he served King Huai as Left Minister until slanderers had him exiled. His long poem Li Sao is the most famous work in a southern style so distinct that it was always classed separately from the poetry of the north.

How they rose: Sima Qian says he belonged to the Chu royal clan and rose under King Huai (r. 328 to 299 BC) as a trusted minister.

How they died: The traditional account is that he drowned himself in the Miluo River in modern Hunan, holding a rock, around 278 BC after the fall of Ying.

• In 278 BC the Qin general Bai Qi captured the Chu capital, Ying, and Qu Yuan is said to have written his Lament for Ying on hearing the news.
• Later tradition links his drowning with the Dragon Boat Festival, though another origin story has the festival commemorate Wu Zixu, a statesman who died in 484 BC.
• After his death, many writers from the Chu region imitated his style, creating a whole genre.

Sources: Wikipedia: Qu Yuan; Chinaknowledge (U. Theobald): Chuci, Poetry of the South; Wikipedia: Dragon Boat Festival; Martin Kern and Stephen Owen, eds. (2024), Qu Yuan and the Chuci: New Approaches, introduction

Dujiangyan: the river that was divided, not dammed (begun c. 256 BC and still in use)

Around 256 BC, under King Zhao of Qin, the state began a flood control and irrigation project where the Min River leaves the mountains for the Chengdu Plain. The engineer Li Bing is credited with it. Instead of damming the river, the scheme channels and divides the water, which had once rushed down, dropped its silt and flooded the plain. It turned the region into productive farmland and keeps the same design, repeatedly rebuilt, in use today, more than 2,250 years later. It is a UNESCO World Heritage Site together with Mount Qingcheng, considered one of the birthplaces of Daoism.

• Modern figures for the area watered vary: the Wikipedia article gives over 5,300 square km in one place and 668,700 hectares of farmland in another.
• An Eastern Han statue of Li Bing has been recovered, showing that he was honoured for the project centuries later.
• Better irrigation by ditches and canals, along with iron tools and drained marshes, raised farm output across the Warring States.

Sources: Wikipedia: Mount Qingcheng; Wikipedia: Dujiangyan; World History Encyclopedia: Warring States Period

Li Si (c. 280 to 208 BC)

Li Si, Chancellor · Qin dynasty

Li Si began as a minor local official in the state of Chu, studied under the Confucian thinker Xunzi and then moved to Qin. There he talked the king out of a plan to expel foreigners and rose to become the state's leading minister. He helped unify laws, ordinances, weights and measures, carts and written characters across the conquered lands. The World History Encyclopedia reports that in 213 BC he proposed the destruction of books that did not serve the state. The translator John Knoblock ranked him among the most important figures in Chinese history.

How they rose: He left Chu for Qin after his studies with Xunzi, and his memorial defending foreign officials won the king's favour and promotion to high office.

How they died: In 208 BC his former ally Zhao Gao had him subjected to the Five Punishments and executed by being cut at the waist in a public market, and his family was exterminated.

• Although educated by a Confucian, the Shiji says he took his approach to law from Shang Yang and admired the administrative methods of Shen Buhai.
• When the First Emperor died away from the capital, Li Si and the court official Zhao Gao suppressed the choice of Fusu as heir.
• He rose under King Zheng after Lü Buwei's fall in the 230s BC; the Shiji has him as Minister of Justice in 221 BC and chancellor only later, and he served the First and Second Emperors until 208 BC.

Sources: Wikipedia: Li Si; World History Encyclopedia: Qin Dynasty; World History Encyclopedia: Legalism; Wikipedia: Lü Buwei

Qin Shi Huang (born 259 BC; king of Qin from 247 or 246 BC; emperor 221 to 210 BC)

Ying Zheng (or Zhao Zheng), King Zheng of Qin, Qin Shi Huangdi (First Emperor of Qin), Qin dynasty · Xianyang

Known as Ying Zheng or Zhao Zheng, the future First Emperor came to the Qin throne at 13 and took personal power after the fall of his regent, Lü Buwei. Using the machinery built by Shang Yang's reforms, he defeated the other states and united China in 221 BC. He coined the title huangdi by combining the names of the mythical Three Sovereigns and Five Emperors. His reign standardised laws, weights and measures, the writing system and even the width of cart axles, and it began works including roads, canals and walls. The Shiji reports the burning of books and the burial alive of some 460 scholars, a story that is traditional and rests on that later source.

How they came to power: Born in Handan, capital of Zhao, he succeeded his father at 13 in 247 or 246 BC with Lü Buwei as regent. After Lü's disgrace and suicide he ruled alone, with Li Si as his chief minister, and conquered the other states.

How it ended: He died in 210 BC during his fifth tour of the east. Some sources say he was poisoned by an elixir of immortality he was taking, and the World History Encyclopedia names mercury, but the cause is not certain.

• In 227 BC Jing Ke, sent by Crown Prince Dan of Yan, tried to stab him at court during a formal audience, one of several assassination attempts.
• Sima Qian says his real father was the merchant Lü Buwei rather than King Zhuangxiang. The story comes from a Han historian writing under the dynasty that replaced Qin.
• His mausoleum, begun soon after he became king, lies in Lintong District, Xi'an. Sources disagree on the height of its mound, with 60 m and 76 m both given.

Sources: World History Encyclopedia: Shi Huangdi; Wikipedia: Qin Shi Huang; Wikipedia: Mausoleum of Qin Shi Huang; World History Encyclopedia: Qin Dynasty; Columbia University, Asia for Educators: Timeline of Chinese Dynasties

Liu Bang (Emperor Gaozu) (born 256 or 247 BC; emperor 202 to 195 BC)

Liu Bang, courtesy name Ji, Emperor Gaozu of Han, Han dynasty · Chang'an

Liu Bang was among the few founders of Chinese dynasties born a peasant, and he began as a low-ranking law officer in Pei. He led a rebel band in 209 BC, entered the Qin heartland before his rival Xiang Yu, and defeated him in 202 BC. As emperor, he cut taxes and labour service, and at first based his capital at Luoyang before moving to Chang'an. He also promoted Confucianism and suppressed revolts by vassal kings from outside his own clan.

How they came to power: As a Qin officer escorting prisoners to Mount Li, he lost them to desertion and fled to the hills. In 209 BC he returned to Pei and took command of rebels, won the title King of Han from Xiang Yu, then turned on him.

How it ended: He was severely wounded by an arrow during a campaign against King Ying Bu, and he died on 1 June 195 BC. His son Liu Ying succeeded him.

• In 200 BC the Xiongnu defeated him at Baideng, after which he began heqin, peace through marriage alliances and gifts, a policy Emperor Wu later challenged.
• On first taking the Qin capital he declared its oppressive laws invalid and promised a just penal law.
• At the Hongmen meeting, on the advice of Zhang Liang, he personally visited his stronger rival Xiang Yu to beg forgiveness.

Sources: Wikipedia: Emperor Gaozu of Han; Chinaknowledge (U. Theobald): Han Gaozu (Liu Bang); World History Encyclopedia: Han Dynasty; Columbia University, Asia for Educators: Timeline of Chinese Dynasties

The terracotta army (made c. 246 to 210 BC; found 29 March 1974)

Near Xi'an in March 1974, Yang Zhifa, his brothers and a neighbour were digging a well about 1.5 km from the First Emperor's tomb mound when they struck the first figures. Estimates from 2007 put the three pits at more than 8,000 soldiers, 130 chariots with 520 horses and 150 cavalry horses, most still in the ground. Pit 1 alone is 230 m long and 62 m wide. The mausoleum is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and most of the figures are still buried. The figures were built from a limited set of moulded parts, then finished so that each looks different.

• The figures were once brightly painted, but the lacquer under the paint can curl within 15 seconds of exposure to Xi'an's dry air and flake off in four minutes.
• Sima Qian describes the tomb with rivers of mercury and 700,000 labourers sent from across the empire. High levels of mercury found in the soil of the mound have given his account some support, but the inner tomb has yet to be excavated.
• The mausoleum is a whole burial complex, and the army is only one part of it. Estimates of its area run from 35 to 60 square km in the World History Encyclopedia to about 98 square km from ground-penetrating radar.

Sources: Wikipedia: Mausoleum of Qin Shi Huang; World History Encyclopedia: Terracotta Army; Wikipedia: Terracotta Army

Empress Lü (241 to 180 BC; dominant from 195 BC)

Lü Zhi, courtesy name Exu, Empress Gao of Han, Han dynasty · Chang'an

Lü Zhi married Liu Bang before he rose to power and was held hostage by Xiang Yu until 203 BC. As empress she helped destroy the founder's powerful generals Han Xin and Peng Yue, working with ministers such as Xiao He. After Liu Bang died in 195 BC she ruled through her son Emperor Hui and then through two child emperors. She is described as the first woman to hold the title of empress of China along with paramount power. Later writers blamed her for usurping the throne of the Liu family, though Chinaknowledge notes that her reign ended a long age of warfare.

How they came to power: Her father moved to Pei, Liu Bang's home town, and arranged the marriage. She became empress when he took the throne in 202 BC and empress dowager when he died.

How it ended: She died on 18 August 180 BC, aged about 60.

• After Liu Bang's death she took revenge on her rival Lady Qi, mutilating her and displaying her as 'the human pig', according to the histories.
• Her father, skilled at reading faces, is said to have foretold Liu Bang's success and given his daughter to him on the strength of it.
• She put to death Han Xin while Liu Bang was away from the capital, and pressed for Peng Yue's execution, which Liu Bang approved at Luoyang, as a lesson to the aristocracy and other generals.

Sources: Wikipedia: Empress Lü; Chinaknowledge (U. Theobald): Empress Lü; Chinaknowledge (U. Theobald): Han period, event history; Robert Eno, Indiana University, History G380 class text: The Reigns of the Early Han Emperors

The Great Wall: what is real and what is myth (joined c. 220 BC under Qin; rebuilt by later dynasties until the Ming (1368 to 1644))

Around 220 BC Qin Shi Huang had earlier state fortifications joined into a united defence against northern invasion. Construction continued under later dynasties until the Ming. The best known stretches, with their watchtowers, are Ming work rather than Qin. The World History Encyclopedia and Wikipedia give a total length for the whole system of 21,196 km. The wall is a chain of different works built across some eighteen centuries.

• Legend: the Great Wall visible from space. A 1932 Ripley's cartoon claimed it could be seen from the moon, and the World History Encyclopedia traces a similar claim to Henry Norman in 1895. Neil Armstrong reported no human structures from the moon, and after China's astronaut Yang Liwei flew in 2003, Chinese reports said schoolbooks would be rewritten.
• It can be photographed from orbit in good light: Leroy Chiao's 2004 photo from the International Space Station caught part of it when the sun's angle cast long shadows, which NASA experts later confirmed, although Chiao said he was not sure what he had seen.
• Legend: Lady Meng Jiang wept for her husband, a Qin labourer, until the wall collapsed and revealed his bones. The tale's seed is an anecdote in the Zuozhuan about a warrior's widow of the state of Qi, centuries before Qin, with no wall in it, and it is now counted among China's Four Great Folktales.

Sources: Wikipedia: Great Wall of China; World History Encyclopedia: Great Wall of China; Scientific American: Is China's Great Wall Visible from Space?; Associated Press via NBC News: Great-Wall-in-space myth comes crumbling down; Wikipedia: Lady Meng Jiang

Chen Sheng, Xiang Yu and the fall of Qin (209 to 202 BC)

In 209 BC Chen Sheng and Wu Guang, conscripts picked as squad leaders, were marching to the frontier at Yuyang when a severe storm stopped them in what is now Anhui. By the traditional account Qin law mandated death for arriving late, so they chose to rebel at Dazexiang. Their uprising was crushed by early 208 BC, but revolt had spread across the former states. Xiang Yu of Chu and the commoner Liu Bang emerged as its leaders, and in 207 or 206 BC Liu Bang reached the Qin capital at Xianyang and accepted the surrender of the last ruler, Ziying. The two victors then fought each other until Xiang Yu's death in 202 BC.

• Qin lasted barely 15 years as an empire, from 221 to 206 BC.
• After Qin fell, Xiang Yu took the title Hegemonial King of Western Chu and handed Liu Bang the remote, mountainous region of the River Han, which he judged too poor to support a war.
• Liu Bang had himself deserted Qin service before the rising, after prisoners he was escorting to Mount Li ran away and he feared punishment.

Sources: Wikipedia: Chen Sheng and Wu Guang uprising; World History Encyclopedia: Qin Dynasty; Chinaknowledge (U. Theobald): Han Gaozu (Liu Bang); Chinaknowledge (U. Theobald): Empress Lü

Mawangdui and Lady Dai (Lady Dai died some years after 168 BC; tombs excavated from 1972)

Three Western Han tombs at Mawangdui in Changsha belong to a family of the local nobility: Li Cang, Marquis of Dai, who died in 186 BC, his wife Xin Zhui, and their son. They yielded silk paintings, clothes and textiles. The final inventory announced by the Hunan Museum in 2024 counts 26,937 items, in the categories of lacquerware, textiles and bamboo and silk manuscripts. Xin Zhui's body is one of the best-preserved ever found, with organs and blood vessels intact. A T-shaped painted silk banner about two metres long lay on top of her innermost coffin.

• Researchers found 138 melon seeds in her digestive tract and concluded that she died within two or three hours of eating melon, in summer.
• Examination showed schistosomiasis, gallstones, coronary disease and other conditions, and she is thought to have died of a heart attack at about 50.
• The Mawangdui silk Laozi manuscripts, found in 1973, are among the oldest known copies of the text, one probably made before 195 BC.

Sources: Wikipedia: Xin Zhui; Wikipedia: Mawangdui; Hunan Provincial Government: Complete Inventory of Mawangdui Tombs Artifacts Finalized; Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Laozi

Emperor Wu of Han (156 to 87 BC; reigned 141 to 87 BC)

Liu Che, Han Wudi, Han dynasty · Chang'an

Liu Che took the throne at 16 and reigned for 54 years, a record that stood until the Kangxi Emperor. He broke with the old policy of buying peace from the Xiongnu and sent generals including Wei Qing and Huo Qubing against them, establishing commanderies as far west as Dunhuang. His armies also took Nanyue in the south and Korea in the northeast. To pay for it the state monopolised salt and iron. He took up the proposal of Dong Zhongshu and Gongsun Hong for a National University teaching the Confucian classics.

How they came to power: A son of Emperor Jing and Lady Wang, he was made a prince as a child and then took the throne in 141 BC at the age of 16 by Chinese reckoning.

How it ended: A witch-hunt in 91 BC led to the rebellion and death of his heir, Liu Ju. He died on 29 March 87 BC, naming the young boy Liu Fuling as heir with a council of four to assist him.

• In 127 BC he changed the rules of inheritance for princes, ending the grant of territory with those titles and so shrinking the power of the kingdoms.
• He is the emperor under whom Sima Qian was jailed and castrated after the Li Ling affair of 99 BC, so the main history of his reign was written by a man he had punished.
• He divided the empire into 13 provinces, each supervised by a regional inspector, to keep watch on local officials.

Sources: Chinaknowledge (U. Theobald): Emperor Han Wudi; Wikipedia: Emperor Wu of Han; Columbia University, Asia for Educators: Timeline of Chinese Dynasties; World History Encyclopedia: Han Dynasty

Sima Qian (born 145 or 135 BC; died c. 86 BC)

Sima Qian, courtesy name Zizhang, Historian · Han dynasty, Chang'an

Sima Qian inherited from his father Sima Tan both the post of grand historian, which chiefly involved the calendar and archives, and the plan for a complete history. The result was the Shiji, or Records of the Grand Historian, in 130 chapters, running from the Yellow Emperor to his own day. In 99 BC he spoke up for the general Li Ling, who had surrendered to the Xiongnu, and was jailed and castrated. The work influenced countless later historians and earned him the name Father of Chinese History.

How they rose: Trained in the classics, he became a court gentleman and took over his father's post in 108 BC.

How they died: Unknown. His death is sometimes dated to 86 BC, late in or after Emperor Wu's reign, and the circumstances are not recorded.

• In 104 BC he helped draft the Taichu Calendar, which replaced the older Zhuanxu calendar.
• He travelled widely as a young man, accompanied Emperor Wu on inspection tours, and was sent as an envoy to Shu and Ba.
• In his Letter to Ren An he explained that he accepted disgrace rather than suicide because his writing was unfinished.

Sources: Chinaknowledge (U. Theobald): Sima Qian; Chinaknowledge (U. Theobald): Shiji; World History Encyclopedia: Sima Qian; Wikipedia: Sima Qian

Zhang Qian and the Silk Road (first mission from c. 138 BC, return 126 BC; he died c. 114 BC)

Emperor Wu wanted an alliance with the Yuezhi against the Xiongnu and sent Zhang Qian west around 138 BC with about a hundred men. The Xiongnu captured him and held him for more than ten years, during which he married and had a son. He escaped and reached the Yuezhi, by then settled near Bactria, but they had no wish to fight. Captured again on the way home, he got back in 126 BC with reports on Central Asia. Han contact and trade grew from there, and the name 'Silk Road' itself dates only from Ferdinand von Richthofen in 1877.

• In 2014 UNESCO listed a 5,000 km stretch of the network, running from central China to the Zhetysu region of Central Asia.
• In Bactria he learned that goods reached that country from Shu (Sichuan) through India, and Emperor Wu tried to open that southern route, without success.
• On a later mission he led 300 men to the Wusun, sending delegations on from there to the Dayuan, Kangju, Yuezhi and Bactria.

Sources: Chinaknowledge (U. Theobald): Zhang Qian; Wikipedia: Zhang Qian; Wikipedia: Silk Roads, the Routes Network of Chang'an-Tianshan Corridor; World History Encyclopedia: Silk Road

The Salt and Iron Debate (81 BC)

Emperor Wu's wars were funded in part by state monopolies on salt and iron. After his death the regent Huo Guang called scholars to Chang'an in 81 BC to debate these policies. The reformists, largely Confucian, demanded an end to the monopolies and price controls and large cuts to spending, to ease the burden on ordinary people. The modernists defended them as a way of taking merchants' profits for the state to pay for campaigns in the north and west. The arguments were later written up by the official Huan Kuan as the Discourses on Salt and Iron.

• The modernists largely won in the short term, and their policies carried on through most of the Western Han.
• The reformists' side prevailed under the Eastern Han, when these policies were repealed except for the state monopoly on coinage.
• Chinaknowledge says this decision to monopolise salt and iron would shape state finance for the next two thousand years.

Sources: Wikipedia: Discourses on Salt and Iron; Chinaknowledge (U. Theobald): Emperor Han Wudi; Chinaknowledge (U. Theobald): Han period, economy; Huan K'uan, trans. Esson M. Gale (1931): Discourses on Salt and Iron (University of Virginia); Chinaknowledge (U. Theobald): Yantielun

Wang Mang (45 BC to AD 23; emperor AD 9 to 23)

Wang Mang, courtesy name Jujun, Emperor of Xin, Xin dynasty · Chang'an

Wang Mang rose through his aunt, the Empress Dowager Wang Zhengjun, to become the most powerful man at the Han court, and he took the throne himself in AD 9 as founder of the Xin dynasty. He tried to bring back the well-field system by declaring land 'royal fields', banned the sale of slaves, and extended state monopolies over goods and markets in six major cities. His new coinage and administrative titles added to the disorder. The Yellow River flooded in AD 11 and changed its course, and the distress fed the Lülin and Red Eyebrow revolts.

How they came to power: A nephew of the empress dowager, he dominated the court as a regent during the reigns of boy emperors, then replaced the Han outright in AD 9.

How it ended: Rebels overran Chang'an in October AD 23. He was killed there on 6 October; Chinaknowledge names a merchant, Du Wu, as his killer, and Wikipedia says his body was cut into pieces as soldiers fought over the credit. The Han was restored by Emperor Guangwu in AD 25.

• Traditional Chinese history treats him as a tyrant and usurper, while some more recent historians have portrayed him as a visionary social reformer.
• Historians did not recognise the Xin as a legal dynasty, so his story survives in hostile hands.
• The Yellow River changed course twice during six years of his reign, and these disasters are given as a major cause of the distress that ended in rebellion.

Sources: Chinaknowledge (U. Theobald): Wang Mang and the Xin Dynasty; Encyclopedia of World Biography via Encyclopedia.com: Wang Mang; Wikipedia: Wang Mang; EBSCO Research Starters (Jiu-Hwa Lo Upshur): Wang Mang; Robert Eno, Indiana University, History G380 class text: The Reigns of the Early Han Emperors

Ban Zhao (c. 45 to c. 117; other sources give 49 and c. 120)

Ban Zhao, courtesy name Huiban, known as Cao Dagu (Venerable Madame Cao), Historian and teacher · Eastern Han dynasty, Luoyang

Ban Zhao came from a family of scholars: her father Ban Biao and brother Ban Gu worked on the Hanshu, the history of the Former Han, and another brother, Ban Chao, was a noted general. When Ban Gu died in 92, she took over the unfinished work with Ma Xu, using the imperial archives. She is credited with the eight tables and with revising the whole book, though sources differ on the treatise on astronomy: Chinaknowledge credits her, Yuen Ting Lee says she shared in it, and Wikipedia credits Ma Xu. She also taught at court, and her students included Empress Deng. The scholar Ma Rong sought her help with difficult passages.

How they rose: She married Cao Shishu at 14, and after he died early she devoted herself to scholarship. The court called on her to finish her brother's history and to teach the palace women.

How they died: She died around 117 by most accounts; the cause is not recorded.

• Her Lessons for Women (Nüjie) urged humility and devotion but also argued for educating girls alongside boys. It is variously dated to around 80 and to 99 to 105.
• She taught the women of the palace astronomy, mathematics, history and the Confucian classics, according to the historian Yuen Ting Lee.
• Empress Dowager Deng also sought her counsel on political matters during her regency.

Sources: Chinaknowledge (U. Theobald): Ban Zhao; Wikipedia: Ban Zhao; Yuen Ting Lee, World History Connected: Ban Zhao, Scholar of Han Dynasty China; EBSCO Research Starters: Ban Zhao and Lessons for Women; UCLA Asia Institute: Lessons for Women, Ban Zhao

Cai Lun and paper (born c. 50 to 62; died 121; paper presented 105)

Cai Lun, courtesy name Jingzhong, Marquis of Longting, Court eunuch · Eastern Han dynasty, Luoyang

Cai Lun came to the Han court as a boy from a poor family in Guiyang, was castrated, and rose to direct the Imperial Manufactories. Writing at the time meant costly silk or heavy bamboo slips. In 105 he presented the throne with a refined paper made from tree bark, hemp, rags and old fishnets, and it was known as 'the paper of Marquis Cai'. He is traditionally called the inventor, but earlier forms of paper had existed since the 3rd century BC, and the oldest surviving fragment, from Fangmatan in Gansu, is dated 179 to 141 BC, so his achievement was an improvement. His process is credited with making paper manufacture possible on a large scale.

How they rose: He entered palace service young and advanced under Emperors Zhang and He, gaining the top eunuch post of Palace Attendant-in-ordinary and control of the imperial workshop.

How they died: He was implicated in the death of Consort Song, a relative of Emperor An (his grandmother in one account, his mother in another). When his protector the Empress Dowager Deng died in 121, he was called to answer for it and, expecting a death sentence, killed himself.

• The main source on him is about 300 characters in the Hou Hanshu, compiled centuries later by Fan Ye.
• He was made Marquis of Longting in 114 as a reward, the source of the name of his paper.
• The character for paper, zhi, is older than paper itself; it first referred to a silk fabric.

Sources: Chinaknowledge (U. Theobald): Cai Lun; Wikipedia: Cai Lun; Chinaknowledge (U. Theobald): Han period, science and technology; University of Washington, Tateuchi East Asia Library: Invention of Paper and Paper Making; Wikipedia: History of paper

Buddhism reaches China and the White Horse legend (legend sets it between AD 60 and 68; actual arrival probably earlier)

Buddhist tradition holds that Emperor Ming of the Eastern Han dreamed of a tall golden man hovering before his palace, was told it was the Buddha, and sent envoys west. They are said to have returned with monks, images and scriptures on a white horse, and to have settled in the newly built White Horse Monastery in Luoyang, by tradition founded in AD 68. This is a legend. EBSCO's account says the story first appears in the Hou Han ji by Yuan Hong (328 to 397), some three centuries later, and Fan Ye's 5th-century Hou Hanshu calls it a current tradition. Scholars think Buddhism came earlier and gradually along the trade routes, gaining a foothold in the capital during the 1st century AD.

• The French sinologist Henri Maspero concluded that the dream story has no basis in fact and was created in the 3rd century.
• Erik Zürcher argues that the date and details of the introduction are unknown, though it must fall between the first half of the 1st century BC and the middle of the 1st century AD.
• The Sutra in Forty-two Sections is popularly held to be the first Buddhist text translated into Chinese, though there is disagreement over whether it was translated or composed in China.

Sources: EBSCO Research Starters: Buddhism Enters China; Wikipedia: White Horse Temple; Chinaknowledge (U. Theobald): Han period, religion; Fan Ye, Hou Hanshu ch. 88, trans. John E. Hill: The Western Regions (University of Washington, Silk Road Seattle)

Zhang Heng (AD 78 to 139)

Zhang Heng, courtesy name Pingzi, Astronomer, engineer and poet · Eastern Han dynasty, Luoyang

Zhang Heng was a polymath who served twice as the court's Chief Astronomer, from 115 to 120 and from 126 to 132. He built a water-powered armillary sphere, improved the inflow water clock and catalogued about 2,500 stars. He understood the Moon as a sphere lit by reflected sunlight, and he also wrote poetry that influenced later writers. In 132 he presented a seismoscope to the court, a bronze device said to show the direction of a distant earthquake. No original survives, so what is known of it comes from the Book of Later Han, written in the 5th century by Fan Ye.

How they rose: Born to a distinguished but not wealthy family in Nanyang, he studied in Luoyang and Chang'an, began as a minor official in Nanyang and was called to court for his learning.

How they died: He retired from the central court to govern Hejian, returned briefly to Nanyang, was recalled to the capital in 138 and died there in 139.

• The Book of Later Han says the device once triggered when no one had felt a tremor, and a messenger later reported an earthquake in Longxi (modern Gansu), about 500 km away. Feng Rui and Yu Yan-xiang date this quake to 13 December 134, and call the older date of 138 a mistake.
• No original survives and modern models are reconstructions; the Book of Later Han mentions a swinging pendulum inside the vessel.
• Writers call it a seismoscope, seismometer or seismograph. Seismoscope fits best, since it signalled that shaking had happened and from which direction, without making a continuous record.

Sources: Wikipedia: Zhang Heng; Chinaknowledge (U. Theobald): Han period, science and technology; University of St Andrews, MacTutor History of Mathematics: Zhang Heng; Feng Rui and Yu Yan-xiang (2006), Acta Seismologica Sinica: Zhang Heng's Seismometer and Longxi earthquake in AD 134

The Yellow Turbans and the end of the Han (AD 184 to 220)

By the 2nd century AD floods, hunger, earthquakes and heavy taxes had filled northern China with refugees, while eunuchs and officials fought at court. In 184 the Daoist healer Zhang Jue and his brothers raised a rebellion promising an age of Great Peace; followers wore yellow cloth around their heads. The main revolt was put down within a year, although mopping up took until 205. The generals who did so became independent warlords. In 189 Dong Zhuo marched on Luoyang, and in 196 Cao Cao took control of Emperor Xian, who in practice became his hostage.

• Cao Cao's advance south was stopped at the Battle of Red Cliffs in 208 to 209 by the allied forces of Sun Quan and Liu Bei.
• The Han formally ended in 220, when Cao Cao's son Cao Pi pressed Emperor Xian to abdicate in his favour, opening the Three Kingdoms period.
• The novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms opens with these events, beginning with the oath of Liu Bei, Guan Yu and Zhang Fei against the rebels; it is fiction built on the history.

Sources: Wikipedia: Yellow Turban Rebellion; Chinaknowledge (U. Theobald): Han period, event history; World History Encyclopedia: Han Dynasty; World History Encyclopedia: Cao Cao

Cao Cao (c. 155 to 220)

Cao Cao; posthumously titled Emperor Wu of Wei, Warlord and chief minister, end of the Han · Xu (Xuchang) and northern China

Cao Cao was the general who dominated the dying Han dynasty, ruling the north while keeping a powerless emperor at his side. He moved that emperor from Luoyang to Xu, now Xuchang in Henan, and issued orders in his name. His victory over Yuan Shao at Guandu in 199 to 200 made him the strongest warlord in China, and by 207 he held much of northern China. His drive to unite the whole country collapsed at Red Cliffs on the Yangtze in 208. Confucian historians and the 14th-century novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms made him the archetypal villain, while modern historians tend to see a skilful general and practical politician.

How they rose: His father was the adopted son of the chief eunuch at court. He began as a minor garrison commander, made his name fighting the Yellow Turban Rebellion, and was established as governor of Yan province by 196.

How they died: He died at Luoyang in 220 without taking the throne himself. Later that year the last Han ruler, Xiandi, gave it up to his son Cao Pi, who proclaimed the Wei dynasty.

• Cao Cao wrote an account of his own life, the Apologia, in 210 to 211, which World History Encyclopedia counts among the earliest autobiographies.
• He is said to have had a million men under arms at one point, though that figure comes from tradition and should be treated with caution.
• Centuries later Su Shi's prose poem on the Red Cliffs recalled him chanting verse with a spear across his knees, a sign that he was remembered as a poet as well as a commander.

Sources: Encyclopaedia Britannica: Cao Cao; World History Encyclopedia: Cao Cao; Columbia University, Asia for Educators: The Three Perfections (Su Shi's Former Ode on the Red Cliff, trans. Pauline Chen)

The Three Kingdoms (220 to 280)

The Han dynasty ended in 220, and China split between Cao Wei in the north, Shu Han in the west and Eastern Wu in the south and east. Historians usually date the period from 220 to 280, although three independent states strictly existed only from 229, when the Wu ruler declared himself emperor, until Shu fell in 263. Wei was itself replaced by the Jin family in 265 or 266. The Jin conquest of Wu in 280 reunified the country. The years were short but have been romanticised across East Asia ever since.

• A census taken in 280 listed 16,163,863 people, against 56,486,856 in the Eastern Han registers of 156. Plague, famine and war all played a part, and a census records only those the state could count.
• The authoritative history is Chen Shou's Records of the Three Kingdoms, written around 290 and later annotated by Pei Songzhi in 429.
• The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, the 14th-century novel that fixed the period in popular memory, is fiction built on this history and should not be read as a record of it.

Sources: Wikipedia: Three Kingdoms; World History Encyclopedia: Cao Cao; Encyclopaedia Britannica: Cao Cao

Wang Xizhi (c. 303 to c. 361)

Wang Xizhi; courtesy name Yishao; revered as the Sage of Calligraphy, Calligrapher and official · Eastern Jin

Wang Xizhi is the most celebrated calligrapher in Chinese history, honoured across East Asia as the Sage of Calligraphy. Born in Langya, in present-day Linyi, Shandong, he fled south as a child after the Western Jin collapsed. In 353 he hosted a gathering at the Orchid Pavilion on Mount Kuaiji for the spring purification festival, where the guests drank and composed poems. His preface to their poems, the Lantingji xu, became the model for running script. Emperor Taizong of Tang later made Wang's style the standard for the whole court.

How they rose: He studied calligraphy with relatives, including Wei Shuo, and held government posts between 324 and 354. It is said that a few of his characters were already priceless in his lifetime.

How they died: He died around 361. The circumstances are unknown, though his letters complain of chronic poor health, and he took medicines including the toxic Cold-Food Powder.

• Emperor Taizong collected more than 2,000 works attributed to Wang, originals and copies together. According to legend he was buried with the original Orchid Pavilion preface, and a Tang copy by Feng Chengsu of about 627 to 650 is among the versions known today.
• In the most refined method reported, court copyists placed paper over an original in sunlight, traced the outline of each character and filled it in with ink.
• An early collector named Duke Hui was reportedly fooled by dealers who soaked forgeries in dirty water to make them look old.

Sources: Encyclopaedia Britannica: Wang Xizhi; World History Foundation (Ancient History Encyclopedia): Master of Arts: Wang Xizhi in Japan and China (interview with Tomita Jun); Wikipedia: Wang Xizhi

The Ballad of Mulan (legend) (probably composed in the Northern Wei period, 386 to 535)

The Ballad of Mulan is an anonymous poem of 62 lines about a girl who disguises herself as a man and goes to war in place of her old father. Scholars think it arose under the Northern Wei, the dynasty of the Tuoba Xianbei who ruled northern China. The earliest surviving text comes from a Song dynasty anthology, the Yuefu Shiji, compiled by Guo Maoqian, who names a lost 6th-century collection as his source. Mulan is a legend: World History Encyclopedia reports a scholarly consensus that she is fictional, Britannica says no surviving evidence supports the old belief that the song was true, and her name is absent from Exemplary Women, a collection of biographies of Northern Wei women. Her story grew through Ming and Qing plays and novels long before Disney's film of 1998.

• The poem's setting is usually taken to be the Northern Wei wars against the nomadic Rouran, and there is some evidence that the heroine was imagined as Xianbei rather than Han Chinese.
• Later versions changed the ending: a 16th-century play introduced a marriage, and some retellings have Mulan kill herself rather than become the emperor's concubine.
• An English verse version was already in print in 1914, in Eva March Tappan's anthology China, Japan, and the Islands of the Pacific. A crater on Venus is now named after her.

Sources: Fordham Internet History Sourcebooks: The Tale of Mulan, the Maiden Chief (from Tappan, 1914); Philologica Canariensia (Tian and Laguna Mariscal, 2024): La Balada de Mulan: edición, traducción al español e interpretación literaria; World History Encyclopedia: Mulan: The Legend Through History; Encyclopaedia Britannica: Hua Mulan; Wikipedia: Hua Mulan

The Buddhist caves of Yungang and Longmen (c. mid-5th to mid-8th century)

Buddhism reached its first great artistic peak in China under the Northern Wei, a dynasty of the Tuoba clan of the Xianbei that ruled the north from 386 to 535. Near its northern capital at Datong, the Yungang Grottoes were cut from the mid-5th to the early 6th century, with 252 caves and niches and 51,000 statues. They were made on imperial instructions, which UNESCO reads as the state's will expressed through Buddhist belief. When Emperor Xiaowen moved the capital to Luoyang in 494, the work followed, and the Longmen Grottoes rose on both banks of the Yi River. Longmen holds more than 2,300 caves and niches and almost 110,000 statues, carved most intensively up to the mid-8th century.

• The Wei shu, the dynasty's official history, records that the monk Tan Yao proposed five caves in the cliffs west of the capital, each with one great Buddha, and that around 500 Emperor Xuanwu ordered new caves at Longmen modelled on Yungang. UNESCO treats Tan Yao's five caves as a classic of the first peak of Chinese Buddhist art, drawing on models from South and Central Asia while developing a local character.
• Longmen's Yaofangdong Cave carries 140 inscriptions recording treatments for diseases and illnesses, making it a medical record as well as a shrine.
• The move to Luoyang was part of a wider policy of sinicisation under Emperor Xiaowen, in which the Tuoba rulers even changed their surname to Yuan.

Sources: UNESCO World Heritage Centre: Yungang Grottoes; UNESCO World Heritage Centre: Longmen Grottoes; Wikipedia: Northern Wei; Wei shu (Book of Wei), chapter 114, Treatise on Buddhism and Daoism (Chinese text, Wikisource)

Emperor Wen of Sui (541 to 604; reigned 581 to 604)

Yang Jian; Wendi, founder of the Sui dynasty, Sui dynasty · Chang'an (Daxing)

Yang Jian reunified China after some 300 years of division, founding the Sui dynasty in 581 and conquering the south by 589. He built a vast new capital southeast of the ruined Han city of Chang'an and moved in during 583, while it was still half finished. He abolished the hereditary local offices of entrenched families and replaced them with a bureaucracy answerable to the throne. An eight-pronged assault by land and water overwhelmed the southern regime at Nanjing. By 603 his armies and diplomacy had broken Turkish power in the areas that mattered most to him.

How they came to power: He came from a powerful family of mixed descent that served the non-Chinese rulers of the north, and held his first military command at 14. His daughter married the Zhou crown prince, who ruled erratically as Emperor Xuan. When Xuan died in 580, Yang Jian took power as regent, defeated his rivals and took the throne on 4 March 581.

How it ended: He fell ill and died in 604. Britannica's article on him says only that it has been said his son Yang Guang, who succeeded him as Yangdi, killed him; its article on Yangdi calls this generally agreed, so it remains unproven.

• His 'rule of avoidance' forbade officials to serve in their home districts, as a safeguard against local family power.
• From his birthday in 601 he staged an empire-wide enshrining of Buddhist relics at the same set moment in many cities, in the footsteps of the Indian emperor Ashoka.
• The Sui selected new officials by examination and recommendation, the system from which the later civil service examinations grew.

Sources: Encyclopaedia Britannica (Arthur F. Wright): Wendi; Columbia University, Asia for Educators: The Scholar-Official Class and the Civil Service Examinations; Wikipedia: Emperor Wen of Sui

Emperor Taizong of Tang (598 to 649; reigned 626 to 649)

Li Shimin; temple name Taizong, Tang dynasty · Chang'an

Li Shimin was the second emperor of the Tang and the ruler against whom later Chinese monarchs measured themselves. He balanced regional interests among the court aristocracy, expanded the Sui use of examinations for hiring officials, and published a standard edition of the classics. He defeated the eastern Turks and pushed Chinese power far to the west. His court was open to foreign faiths, admitting the Christian missionary Alopen in 635. Wei Zheng, once an adviser to the brother he killed, served as his public conscience.

How they came to power: A son of the dynastic founder Gaozu, he won fame as a general in the wars after the Sui collapse. In 626 he ambushed and killed his brothers Li Jiancheng and Li Yuanji at the Xuanwu Gate, and his father soon gave up the throne.

How it ended: He died in 649 after a reign of 23 years and was succeeded by his son Gaozong. His former concubine Wu Zhao would later rule China herself.

• Britannica warns that the real Taizong is hard to separate from the image he encouraged. His own historians played up his part in the founding of the dynasty, while strong evidence suggests that his role in the 617 uprising was minor.
• The Zhenguan zhengyao, written in 708 to 710, presented his court as a model of ideal government, and his image was revered well beyond China, including by Japanese and Korean statesmen.
• Official histories were compiled in his reign, so the first account of his rise was written by his own historians.

Sources: Encyclopaedia Britannica: Taizong; Encyclopaedia Britannica: Tang dynasty; World History Encyclopedia: Emperor Taizong of Tang

Xuanzang (602 to 664)

Xuanzang (Hsuan-tsang); born Chen Yi or Chen Hui; Sanskrit name Mokshadeva, Buddhist monk and translator · Tang, Chang'an and India

Xuanzang was the monk who travelled to India to resolve contradictions he had found in the Chinese Buddhist scriptures. He left Chang'an by stealth in 629 (a variant tradition says 627), went north of the Taklamakan through Turfan, Kucha, Tashkent and Samarkand, and crossed the Hindu Kush into northwest India. He spent much of his time at the great monastery of Nalanda, perfecting his Sanskrit and studying Buddhist philosophy. He returned to the capital in 645 with 657 items packed in 520 cases. His Records of the Western Regions remains a key source on 7th-century India and Central Asia, although modern scholars note that it mixes firsthand observation with hearsay.

How they rose: He came from a family of scholars and had a Confucian education, but followed an older brother into Buddhism. His reputation in India grew so great that King Harsha of North India honoured him and helped him on his way home.

How they died: He spent his remaining years translating and died on 5 February 664. Britannica places his death at Chang'an, while Wikipedia places it at the Yuhua Palace, in present-day Tongchuan, Shaanxi. The emperor is said to have cancelled audiences for three days in mourning.

• He finished only about 75 of the texts he brought home, in 1,335 chapters, but these included some of the most important Mahayana scriptures.
• Emperor Taizong offered him a ministerial post after hearing his accounts of foreign lands. Xuanzang declined it to go on serving his religion.
• His journey inspired the much later novel Journey to the West, a satirical fantasy rather than a record of his life.

Sources: Encyclopaedia Britannica: Xuanzang; World History Encyclopedia: Emperor Taizong of Tang; Wikipedia: Xuanzang

The Grand Canal of the Sui (main Sui works 605 to 610; older sections from the 5th century BC)

The Grand Canal joined the rice lands of the Yangtze to the capitals and armies of the north. Parts of it were far older, with sections dating from the 5th or 4th century BC, but the Sui were the first to plan it as one system for the whole empire. Work on the New Bian Canal began in 605 under Emperor Yangdi, followed by a canal towards the Beijing area in 608 and further extensions in 610. Farmers, enslaved people and criminals were forced to dig it, and the cost in lives from overwork and disease was enormous. The canal stayed the main artery of the Tang and Northern Song, long after the Sui had fallen in 618.

• UNESCO calls the canal the largest and most extensive civil engineering project in the world before the Industrial Revolution, with more than 2,000 km of artificial waterways by the 13th century, linking five major river basins.
• The Sui canal is not the route seen today. The modern line to Beijing was created under the Mongol Yuan after 1282, and Britannica gives its length as some 1,800 km.
• The expense of the canal, the palaces and failed wars against Goguryeo in Korea fed the rebellions that began in 613. Yangdi was assassinated at Jiangdu, now Yangzhou, in 618.

Sources: UNESCO World Heritage Centre: The Grand Canal; Encyclopaedia Britannica: Grand Canal; Encyclopaedia Britannica: Yangdi; World History Encyclopedia: Sui Dynasty

Tang Chang'an and the Silk Road (618 to 907)

Chang'an, laid out by the Sui as Daxing and renamed in 618, was with Constantinople and Baghdad among the largest cities in the world. It was the eastern terminus of the overland Silk Road, part of a corridor of routes that UNESCO lists as a 5,000 km section running to the Zhetysu region of Central Asia. Trade, religions, technologies and artistic styles all moved along it. Buddhism travelled east along the same roads, leaving pagodas and cave temples from Kucha to Luoyang. Inside the capital, trade was strictly limited to set markets and set hours, and residents lived in walled wards.

• Immigrants brought their religions with them: the evidence suggests at least five or six Zoroastrian temples in the city, with four around the Western Market, and a Church of the East settlement from about 635.
• The rebellions of the later Tang wrecked the city. An Lushan's forces took it in 756, Tibetan troops held it briefly in 763, and in 904 the warlord Zhu Wen forced most of the remaining people to move to Luoyang.
• The rigid plan did not outlast the dynasty for long: the Song capitals had no walled wards, and their shops opened straight onto the street.

Sources: UNESCO World Heritage Centre: Silk Roads: the Routes Network of Chang'an-Tianshan Corridor; Columbia University, Asia for Educators: New Cities (Song Dynasty China); Columbia University, Asia for Educators: The Commercial Revolution (with Robert Hymes on the Tang market system); Wikipedia: Chang'an

Wu Zetian (624 to 705; ruled in her own name 690 to 705)

Wu Zhao; Empress Wu (Wuhou), emperor of the Zhou dynasty, Tang and her own Zhou dynasty · Luoyang and Chang'an

Wu Zhao is the only woman in Chinese history to rule as emperor in her own name. She became empress in 655, and because Gaozong was often too ill to govern, she was the real ruler for the last 23 years of his life. After his death in December 683 she deposed one son after less than two months on the throne, kept another as a figurehead, and in 690 took the throne herself, renaming the dynasty Zhou. She was ruthless with opponents, even her own relatives, yet chose able officials regardless of their rank. Her policies helped shift power from an old military aristocracy to a scholarly bureaucracy.

How they came to power: She entered Taizong's palace in 637 or 638, aged about 14. Sent to a convent when he died in 649, she was brought back by his son Gaozong, then removed her rivals in the palace and gained the title of empress.

How it ended: In February 705 ministers and generals seized the palace, executed her favourites the Zhang brothers and forced her, old and ill, to yield to her son Zhongzong. She died at Luoyang in December of that year.

• The most famous story about her, that she strangled her own baby daughter in 654 to frame Empress Wang, cannot be verified. Later Chinese historians all blame Wu, but the only other account is Wu's own charge against Wang, and World History Encyclopedia says there is no way of knowing if it happened.
• In 698 she recalled her exiled son Zhongzong and made him crown prince, passing over her Wu nephews, so the Tang line survived her.
• Confucian historians such as Liu Xu judged her harshly, and Britannica notes that their prejudice against a usurping empress long obscured the importance of her rule. Even Sima Guang, on the claim that she poisoned her son Li Hong, wrote that the death was hard to establish and that he recorded only what people of the time believed.

Sources: Encyclopaedia Britannica: Wuhou; World History Encyclopedia: Wu Zetian; Encyclopaedia Britannica: Tang dynasty; Wikipedia: Wu Zetian; Wikipedia: Emperor Zhongzong of Tang

Emperor Xuanzong and Yang Guifei (Xuanzong 685 to 762, reigned 712 to 756; Yang Guifei 719 to 756)

Li Longji, temple name Xuanzong; and his consort Yang Yuhuan, known as Yang Guifei, Tang dynasty · Chang'an

Xuanzong's 44 years on the throne were the longest of any Tang emperor, and his Kaiyuan era is usually seen as a golden age of stability, prosperity and art. The dynasty reached the peak of its wealth and power in the early 8th century, the world of Li Bai and Du Fu. In later life he left more of the government to the chief minister Li Linfu. Yang Yuhuan was the wife of his son Li Mao, but the emperor took her for himself, first making her a Daoist nun and then his consort of the highest rank. Her second cousin Yang Guozhong rose to chief minister, and his rivalry with the general An Lushan helped set off the rebellion of 755.

How they came to power: Li Longji helped lead the coup of 710 against Empress Wei, and his father Ruizong gave up the throne to him in 712. In 713 he removed his aunt Princess Taiping, who was forced to kill herself. He began his rule with capable chancellors such as Yao Chong and Song Jing.

How it ended: Fleeing Chang'an in 756, the emperor's guard mutinied at Mawei, killed Yang Guozhong and demanded Yang Guifei's death, to which he reluctantly agreed. He gave up the throne to his son and died in 762.

• Blaming her for the dynasty's troubles is a traditional judgement, and Britannica reports only that the emperor is said to have neglected his duties because of her.
• Bai Juyi's narrative poem Song of Everlasting Sorrow made their story famous, and it was retold in later dramas including The Palace of Eternal Youth of 1688.
• Around 716, on the advice of the minister Yao Chong, Xuanzong ordered a campaign to kill locusts in central China, which was said to have warded off a major famine.

Sources: Encyclopaedia Britannica: Yang Guifei; Encyclopaedia Britannica: An Lushan; Encyclopaedia Britannica: Tang dynasty; Wikipedia: Emperor Xuanzong of Tang

Li Bai (701 to 762)

Li Bai (Li Po); courtesy name Taibai; called the Immortal of Poetry, Poet · Tang

Li Bai and Du Fu are the two rivals for the title of China's greatest poet. He wrote of friendship, solitude, the passing of time and the joys of nature, and he celebrated drinking more famously than anyone in the Chinese tradition. Around 1,000 poems attributed to him survive. His verse is known for clear images and a conversational tone. Through translation it later influenced 20th-century Western poets, among them Ezra Pound and James Wright.

How they rose: He left home in about 725 to wander, then failed to win a post by showing his poems to officials. In 742 he reached Chang'an, where he joined the court poets, and the poet He Zhizhang nicknamed him the 'Immortal Exiled from Heaven'.

How they died: He joined the expedition of Prince Lin in 756, and was imprisoned when the prince was accused of plotting an independent kingdom and executed. Banished in 758, he was amnestied before reaching exile and died in a relative's house in 762.

• The famous story that he drowned while drunk, trying to seize the moon's reflection from a boat, is popular legend. Britannica has him dying at a relative's home in Dangtu, the Old Book of Tang says he died of drink at Xuancheng, and Arthur Waley (1919) reports that Hung Mai already doubted the drowning in the 12th century.
• His origins are disputed: Britannica gives Jiangyou in Sichuan as his birthplace, while the Poetry Foundation says he was probably born in Central Asia and grew up in Sichuan. The 11th-century biography translated by Waley has his family flee to Turkestan and later return.
• He liked to claim kinship with the imperial Li family, but according to Britannica he belonged to a less exalted family of the same surname.

Sources: Encyclopaedia Britannica: Li Bai; Poetry Foundation: Li Bai (Li Po); Wikipedia: Li Bai; Arthur Waley: The Poet Li Po, A.D. 701-762 (1919, Project Gutenberg); Old Book of Tang (Jiu Tang shu), chapter 190b, biography of Li Bai (Chinese text, Wikisource)

Du Fu (712 to 770)

Du Fu (Tu Fu); called the Poet-Historian and the Poet-Sage, Poet · Tang

Du Fu is considered by many critics to be the greatest of all Chinese poets. His early poems praised nature, but he soon turned to war and court luxury, as in The Ballad of the Army Carts, on conscription, and The Beautiful Woman. Between 755 and 759, as the An Lushan rebellion tore through his world, his verse deepened into compassion for people caught up in war. He was a master of regulated verse, using dense language that no translation can fully carry. Later critics gave him the titles Poet-Historian and Poet-Sage.

How they rose: Born in Gongxian, Henan, to a family of minor scholar-officials, he failed the imperial examinations in 735 and again later. After years of submitting flattering literary works he won a nominal court post around 755.

How they died: After years of moving through Sichuan and the Yangtze region, he died in 770. Britannica places his death on a riverboat in Hunan and calls the story of a fatal meal popular legend, while the Old Book of Tang has him die at Leiyang after beef and white wine, with a date of 766 and an age of 59 that do not fit the usual dates of 712 to 770.

• He met Li Bai on his travels and briefly tried Daoism with him. According to Britannica the two never met again, though Du Fu continued to admire him.
• He escaped the rebels and joined the exiled court in 757 as Reminder of the Right, a remonstrance post Britannica calls censor, but his memoranda were unwelcome and he lost the post, falling back into poverty and hunger.
• From December 759 he was based mostly in Sichuan, living in a cottage at Chengdu with help from friends, and wrote many poems about this happier stretch of his life.

Sources: Encyclopaedia Britannica: Du Fu; Poetry Foundation: Du Fu (Tu Fu); Wikipedia: Du Fu; Old Book of Tang (Jiu Tang shu), chapter 190b, biography of Du Fu (Chinese text, Wikisource)

The An Lushan rebellion (755 to 763)

An Lushan, a general of Sogdian and Turkish descent, held three frontier provinces by 752 and was the strongest commander in the empire. Late in 755, claiming a secret order to remove the minister Yang Guozhong, he marched on Luoyang and took it within a month. He proclaimed himself emperor of the Great Yan in early 756, and that summer the Tang army was routed and Chang'an fell. In early 757 a eunuch slave, Li Zhuer, murdered him with the connivance of his younger son An Qingxu, but the war went on under Qingxu, Shi Siming and Shi Chaoyi until 763. Uighur troops played a major part in the final Tang victory, and surviving rebel generals were allowed to keep their regions in return for nominal submission.

• No reliable death toll exists: the census fell from 52,919,309 people in 755 to 16,900,000 in 764, a gap of about 36 million registered people. C. P. Fitzgerald argues that mass depopulation does not fit a war fought intermittently over three or four provinces. Hans Bielenstein (1947) rejected the reading outright and explained the drop as administrative disruption of the registers.
• Matthew White first gave 36 million dead, and Steven Pinker used that figure in The Better Angels of Our Nature while noting it was controversial. White later revised it to 13 million, a figure repeated by Johan Norberg, using a different calculation from the same census results.
• An Lushan's name reflects his origins: 'An' came from the Chinese name for Bukhara, and 'Lushan' from the Iranian word for 'light'. At court he once clowned through a mock adoption by Yang Guifei, wrapped in a giant baby's diaper.

Sources: Encyclopaedia Britannica: An Lushan; Encyclopaedia Britannica: Tang dynasty; Wikipedia: An Lushan rebellion; Old Book of Tang (Jiu Tang shu), chapter 200a, biography of An Lushan (Chinese text, Wikisource)

The Huichang persecution of Buddhism (842 to 846)

Emperor Wuzong began to restrict Buddhism in 842, at first with an edict removing undesirables from the clergy and telling monks and nuns to give up their wealth or return to lay life. The motives were partly financial: wars against the Uighurs had nearly bankrupted the state, and monasteries were rich and exempt from tax. Confucian critics such as Han Yu had argued that monks and nuns undermined the family and produced nothing. Wuzong, who had become a devoted follower of Daoism and was consuming elixirs of immortality, turned to outright suppression in 844 and 845. When he died in 846, his successor proclaimed an amnesty and the persecution ended.

• The edict of 845 claims that more than 4,600 monasteries and over 40,000 smaller shrines were destroyed, and 260,500 monks and nuns returned to lay life, with 150,000 bondservants made taxable. These are the government's own figures.
• Other faiths suffered too: Zoroastrianism and Manichaeism were all but destroyed in China, and Nestorian Christianity went into a decline that lasted until the Yuan. The edict sent more than 3,000 Christian and Zoroastrian clergy back to lay life.
• The Japanese monk Ennin, who was in China at the time, even suggested that the emperor's hostility owed something to his love for a Daoist princess, which shows how the court was talked about rather than proving a motive.

Sources: Wikipedia: Huichang persecution of Buddhism; Old Book of Tang (Jiu Tang shu), chapter 18a, annals of Wuzong with the edict of 845 (Chinese text, Wikisource); Encyclopedia.com (World Eras): Buddhism in Late Tang; Wikipedia: Emperor Wuzong of Tang

The Diamond Sutra of 868 (11 May 868)

The Diamond Sutra, a short and popular Mahayana text, was printed from carved wooden blocks in 868 and survives as a scroll about five metres long. A note at its end says Wang Jie made it for universal free distribution on behalf of his two parents. It uses the Chinese translation made by the monk Kumarajiva around 401. It was sealed for centuries in Cave 17, the Library Cave at Mogao near Dunhuang, among some 40,000 objects found in the early 20th century. Aurel Stein bought it in 1907 from the monk guarding the caves, and it is now in the British Library as Or.8210/P.2.

• It is the oldest dated printed book, not the first printing: other printed material on paper is older, but carries no such date.
• By the 9th century Chinese craftsmen were mass-producing books by carving a whole page of text and pictures into a wooden block, inking it and pressing paper onto it.
• Its closing note gives the date as the 15th day of the 4th month of the 9th year of Xiantong, which converts to 11 May 868.

Sources: Columbia University, Asia for Educators: Printing (Song Dynasty China); Fine Books & Collections: The Diamond Sutra, World's Oldest Dated Complete Printed Book, on Exhibit in LA; Encyclopaedia Britannica: Diamond Sutra; Wikipedia: Diamond Sutra

Huang Chao's rebellion and the end of the Tang (875 to 884 (some date the start to 874); the dynasty fell in 907)

Huang Chao was an educated man who failed the civil service examinations and turned to smuggling salt against the state monopoly. In 875 he gathered several thousand followers and joined the rebellions then spreading across the country. His forces took the rich trading city of Guangzhou in 879, swept back north and captured Chang'an in 881, where he proclaimed himself emperor of the Daqi dynasty. He could not feed the capital, and in 883 the government, allied with the Shatuo Turks, drove him out. Tang control over the country had been destroyed by the ten-year revolt, and in 907 the dynasty fell.

• He died in Shandong in July 884, reportedly killed by his nephew Lin Yan, who took the heads of the family to surrender. The New Book of Tang instead has him kill himself and tell Lin to surrender with his head. Some have speculated that the heads were a decoy, so his end is not certain.
• The man who finally ended the Tang, Zhu Wen, was one of Huang Chao's own former generals. Adam Fong (2006) argues that the official histories recast the revolt as a tale of bad officials and wicked bandits, when its roots lay in social instability and heavy burdens on peasants.
• Before seizing the throne, Zhu Wen forced most of Chang'an's remaining population to move to Luoyang in 904, and in the following centuries the great Tang capital was of minor importance.

Sources: Encyclopaedia Britannica: Huang Chao; Wikipedia: Huang Chao; Old Book of Tang (Jiu Tang shu), chapter 200b, biography of Huang Chao (Chinese text, Wikisource); Adam Fong: Ending an Era: The Huang Chao Rebellion of the Late Tang, 874-884 (East-West Center Working Papers, 2006; abstract at Medievalists.net); Wikipedia: Chang'an

The Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms (907 to 979)

The Tang collapsed in 907, ended by the warlord Zhu Wen, who founded the first of five dynasties that followed one another in the Central Plain. More than a dozen other states arose elsewhere, mainly in the south, of which the ten most powerful are remembered as the Ten Kingdoms. North China was devastated by near-constant warfare, while the south remained more prosperous. The Khitan Liao state, founded in the same period, took a strip of land that included modern Beijing. The last of the regimes, Northern Han, held out until the Song conquered it in 979.

• The label 'Five Dynasties' was coined by Song historians, and it reflects their view that the successive regimes of the Central Plain held the Mandate of Heaven.
• Many of these states had already been independent in practice before 907, because late Tang control over its regional military governors had been fading for a long time.
• The Song founder Zhao Kuangyin grew up in this world: his family had won standing as soldiers under one or another of the rival claimants for three generations.

Sources: Wikipedia: Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period; Encyclopaedia Britannica: Taizu, Emperor of Song; Columbia University, Asia for Educators: Rivals (Song Dynasty China)

Emperor Taizu of Song (927 to 976; reigned 960 to 976)

Zhao Kuangyin; temple name Taizu, Northern Song dynasty · Kaifeng

Zhao Kuangyin founded the Song dynasty in 960 and began to reunite China after half a century of division. A successful general, he persuaded powerful potential rivals to give up real power in return for honours and comfortable posts. He took the best military units under his own command and set up a competent, practical civil service. By 976 he had mastered most of the rival states, leaving the northern rival backed by the Khitan, while Wuyue in the south lasted until 978. His younger brother completed the unification within three years, apart from a small area near Beijing that stayed in Khitan hands.

How they came to power: The son of an officer, he rose quickly to chief command of the Later Zhou armies. When a child inherited the throne in 959 and a Khitan invasion threatened, his troops hailed him as emperor at a bridge outside the capital, and he returned to take power.

How it ended: He died on 14 November 976, aged 49, while his armies were mobilised against the last northern rival. His brother succeeded him as the Taizong emperor.

• Britannica notes that the records imply he had no warning of the coup, but that this cannot be verified.
• The early Song emperors used the civil service examinations to bring men with literary educations into government, as a counterweight to the dominance of military men.
• He went about incognito to see how people lived, despite his advisers' protests, and refused a sword stick offered for his protection. Britannica warns that some such anecdotes may include fiction.

Sources: Encyclopaedia Britannica: Taizu, Emperor of Song; Encyclopaedia Britannica: Song dynasty; Columbia University, Asia for Educators: The Scholar-Official Class and the Civil Service Examinations

The civil service examinations under the Song (960 to 1279; origins in the Sui, 581 to 618)

Written examinations for officials go back to the Sui and expanded under the Tang, but only under the Song did they become the normal ladder to success. Candidates were tested on their command of the Confucian texts and usually on policy questions, more as a measure of general education than of law or administration. The number of men entering rose from fewer than 30,000 early in the dynasty to about 400,000 by its end, while the number of posts did not grow. Most men who spent years preparing never became officials, and those who succeeded were on average a little over 30. These exams created the scholar-official class that ran China and spoke up as critics of power.

• To protect fairness, the Song government replaced candidates' names with numbers and had clerks recopy every paper, so that examiners could not recognise the handwriting.
• Under the Mongols the examinations were banned until 1315, and even after that they were no longer the only route into office.
• Zhu Xi's commentaries on the Four Books later became required reading for anyone hoping to pass, which fixed his version of Confucianism into the system.

Sources: Columbia University, Asia for Educators: The Scholar-Official Class and the Civil Service Examinations; World History Encyclopedia: The Civil Service Examinations of Imperial China; Columbia University, Asia for Educators: The Mongols in China; Encyclopaedia Britannica: Zhu Xi

Kaifeng, paper money and the Qingming scroll (960 to 1127)

Historians speak of a Song economic revolution. Between 750 and 1100 China's population doubled from about 50 million to about 100 million, fed by the expansion of rice growing in central and south China. By 1085 the government was minting more than 6 billion coins a year, and merchants' deposit receipts had developed into the world's first government-issued paper money in the 1020s. The capital at Kaifeng is thought to have held about a million people, with shops and restaurants opening right onto the street.

• The scroll Along the River During the Qingming Festival, 25.5 cm high and 5.25 m long, shows the crowds, boats and rainbow bridge of a Song city. It is attributed to the Song painter Zhang Zeduan and is now in the Palace Museum in Beijing.
• Scholars announced this scroll in 1954 and most now accept it as the earliest surviving version. A brightly coloured Qing copy of 1736 by five court painters is in the National Palace Museum in Taipei.
• Kaifeng had 2,000 soldiers at 14 fire stations inside the city, and the government ran public clinics, old age homes and paupers' graveyards.

Sources: Columbia University, Asia for Educators: The Economic Revolution, population; Columbia University, Asia for Educators: Money; Columbia University, Asia for Educators: New Cities; Columbia University, Asia for Educators: Two Versions of the Scroll (Valerie Hansen); Columbia University, Asia for Educators: The Handscroll (Valerie Hansen)

The beginnings of foot binding (origin stories from the 10th century; first firm evidence in the 12th and 13th centuries)

Foot binding spread among elite Chinese women during the Song, although the practice became far more widespread later. The best-known origin story is a legend: the 10th-century ruler Li Yu of the Southern Tang is said to have had his concubine Yao Niang bind her feet in silk to dance on a golden lotus. The first possible references appear in poems around 1100, and soon after 1148 the scholar Zhang Bangji wrote that it had begun in recent times and was not mentioned in older books. Girls' feet were bound to restrict their growth, causing lasting pain and limited mobility. Columbia's Song module places the practice within a wider debate over whether women's status fell in this period, when teachers argued against widows remarrying even as women's property rights stayed relatively secure.

• The earliest archaeological evidence comes from the tombs of Huang Sheng, who died in 1243 aged 17, and Madame Zhou, who died in 1274. Each had feet wrapped in gauze strips about 1.8 m long.
• Song-era binding seems to have differed from later forms. The idea of the 'three-inch' foot and the worst bone deformation appear to belong to a later period, with tomb evidence from the late Ming.
• The practice lasted centuries more. Manchu emperors tried and failed to ban it in the 17th century, and it began to die out only in the early 20th century, after campaigns by reformers and missionaries.

Sources: Columbia University, Asia for Educators: Confucianism and the Family (Song Dynasty China); World History Encyclopedia: Foot-Binding; Wikipedia: Foot binding

Bi Sheng and movable type (990 to 1051 (birth year uncertain); type invented in the 1040s)

Bi Sheng (Pi Sheng), Artisan and inventor · Northern Song

Bi Sheng invented the first known movable type in the 1040s, using a separate piece of baked clay for each Chinese character. The pieces were set on an iron plate covered with a mixture of pine resin, wax and paper ash, and locked in place for printing. Almost everything known about him comes from a single passage in the Dream Pool Essays of Shen Kuo. Movable type was never widely used in China, because carving a whole page on one block was less expensive. Clay was also fragile, and later printers experimented with other materials.

How they rose: He was a commoner without official position, and little else is recorded about him or how he came to his invention.

How they died: Sources give his death as 1051. Nothing is known of the circumstances.

• The official Wang Zhen is credited with introducing more durable wooden type around 1297, and cast-metal type was in use in Korea by the early 13th century.
• A Buddhist text found at Wuwei in Gansu, from the Tangut state of Western Xia, shows traits of clay type and suggests that the technique may have spread after his death.
• Cheap whole-block printing had already lowered the price of books and helped spread literacy, and it may have supplied prompt books for the storytellers shown in the Qingming scroll.

Sources: Columbia University, Asia for Educators: Printing (Song Dynasty China); Columbia University, Asia for Educators: Scientific Experimentation (on Shen Gua and Bi Sheng); Encyclopaedia Britannica: Shen Kuo; Wikipedia: Bi Sheng

Wang Anshi (1021 to 1086; New Policies 1069 to 1076)

Wang Anshi; courtesy name Jiefu; art name Banshan, Chief minister and poet · Northern Song, Kaifeng

Wang Anshi was the Song statesman behind the sweeping reforms known as the New Policies or New Laws. Convinced that unlimited buying up of land was weakening the economy, he began in 1069 with fiscal measures that included government loans to farmers and more money in circulation. He added a land survey for property tax, state involvement in trade, a village militia, paid service in place of unpaid labour, and new programmes for armaments and horse breeding. He also restructured the civil service examinations. The reforms split the court into Reformers and Conservatives, a division that outlived him.

How they rose: After about two decades in local government he sent Emperor Renzong a memorial of ten thousand characters in 1058, calling for reform. Emperor Shenzong brought him to power, and he launched his programme in 1069 as second privy councillor.

How they died: Famine and popular discontent strengthened his opponents, and he resigned in 1074, returning with less power until he retired in 1076. He spent his last years on scholarship and died in 1086.

• The reforms were dismantled after Shenzong's death in 1085, then revived in a weaker form between 1093 and 1125.
• His great opponent among the Conservatives was the historian Sima Guang, compiler of the 294-scroll Comprehensive Mirror in Aid of Governance.
• Britannica notes that his reforms sparked academic controversy for centuries.

Sources: Encyclopaedia Britannica: Wang Anshi; Columbia University, Asia for Educators: Confucian Revival (Song Dynasty China); Wikipedia: Wang Anshi; Wikipedia: Zizhi Tongjian

Shen Kuo and the compass (1031 to 1095; Dream Pool Essays 1088)

Shen Kuo (also Shen Gua); courtesy name Cunzhong, Scholar-official and polymath · Northern Song

Shen Kuo was a Song polymath whose Dream Pool Essays, finished in 1088 on his estate at Zhenjiang, ranges from mathematics to medicine. It contains the first known reference to the magnetic needle compass, including his observation that needles do not point exactly along a true north-south line. It also gives the first description of Bi Sheng's movable type. He tied the tides to the moon rather than the sun, and argued from the waxing and waning of the moon that the sun and moon are spherical. From stone bamboo found in a riverbank he reasoned that the climate of the region must once have been different.

How they rose: He passed the imperial examinations in 1063 and rose to head the Bureau of Astronomy by 1072 as a favourite of the chancellor Wang Anshi. He also served as finance commissioner, envoy to the Liao in 1075 and a military commander, until a defeat by Tangut forces cost him office.

How they died: He moved permanently to his Dream Brook estate in 1088 and died at Jingkou, now Zhenjiang, in 1095.

• The first reports of a compass in use at sea date from 1119. By then the Song were also using watertight bulkheads and stern-mounted rudders on their ships.
• Britannica notes that mariners in China and Europe made the discovery in the 12th century, apparently independently.
• His contemporary Su Song designed and built a mechanical clock tower almost 40 feet high, with a chain drive and an armillary sphere.

Sources: Encyclopaedia Britannica: Shen Kuo; Columbia University, Asia for Educators: Scientific Experimentation (on Shen Gua, quoting Needham); Columbia University, Asia for Educators: The Compass and Shipbuilding; Encyclopaedia Britannica: Compass; Wikipedia: Shen Kuo

Su Shi (8 January 1037 to 24 August 1101)

Su Shi (Su Dongpo); courtesy name Zizhan; art name Householder Dongpo, Poet, painter and official · Northern Song

Su Shi was one of China's greatest poets and essayists, and also an esteemed calligrapher, painter and theorist of art. He made a splash in the examinations and became a celebrity, serving in posts across China, most notably at Hangzhou. He mastered nearly every form, and he loosened the conventions of the ci song, founding the 'heroic abandon' school. He wrote that scholars could fill their paintings with ideas, which he thought placed them above professional work that merely conveyed appearances. His stands on the controversies of the day got him banished from the capital more than once.

How they rose: Born at Meishan in Sichuan to a literary family, the son of Su Xun and brother of Su Zhe, he performed brilliantly in the official examinations. He held government posts from 1060 onward.

How they died: Pardoned in 1100 after a long exile and posted to Chengdu, he died at Changzhou in 1101 on the way, aged 64. His popularity only grew after his death.

• After the Crow Terrace poetry trial of 1079 he was exiled to Huangzhou from 1080 to 1084, and stayed out of office until 1086; his critics claimed that his poems attacked the emperor. Wang Anshi had retired in 1076 and played no part. His second exile, from 1094 to 1100, took him to Huizhou and then to Danzhou on Hainan Island.
• His Former Ode on the Red Cliff, set on an autumn night in 1082, is both a famous prose poem and, in his own hand, a surviving work of calligraphy.
• A causeway he built across the West Lake at Hangzhou still bears his name, Sudi.

Sources: Encyclopaedia Britannica: Su Shi; Columbia University, Asia for Educators: The Three Perfections (with a translation of the Former Ode); Wikipedia: Su Shi

The first gunpowder formula (formula recorded 1044; weapons developed to 1279)

Gunpowder, a mixture of saltpetre, sulfur and charcoal, is thought to have arisen in China, where it was in use by the 10th century. The Wujing zongyao, a military manual compiled by Zeng Gongliang and Ding Du in 1044, records the first true formula and explains how to make it on a large scale. At first it served as an incendiary, in small packets tied to arrows and lit with a fuse. Song engineers went on to bombs of gunpowder and scrap iron thrown by catapult, and fire-spurting lances with barrels of bamboo or metal. These weapons led towards early rockets, cannons, bombs and mines.

• Song efforts to keep improving their weapons were one reason they held off the Mongols for decades, but the Mongols, like the Khitans and Jurchens, adopted the technology, often by capturing Chinese engineers and gunners.
• Britannica's account says early use in China was almost entirely for fireworks and signals, though it may have been used in bombs, so how fast it became a weapon remains a point on which summaries differ.
• Francis Bacon singled out printing, gunpowder and the compass as inventions that changed the world, without knowing that they had come from China.

Sources: Columbia University, Asia for Educators: Gunpowder (Song Dynasty China); Encyclopaedia Britannica: Gunpowder; Columbia University, Asia for Educators: Printing (with Francis Bacon on three Chinese inventions)

Emperor Huizong and the fall of Kaifeng (1082 to 1135; reigned 1100 to 1125/26)

Temple name Huizong; penultimate emperor of the Northern Song, Northern Song dynasty · Kaifeng

Huizong is remembered as a painter, a calligrapher and a patron of the arts, and as the ruler whose reign was fatal to the Northern Song. He urged the painters of his academy to be true to colour and form, and he wrote in an elegant style called 'slender gold'. He promoted Daoism at court and spent lavishly on a palace garden stocked with rare plants, coloured stones and exotic pets, while leaving government to others. To destroy the Liao he allied with the Jurchen of Manchuria, who then turned on him. The Jurchen Jin sacked Kaifeng in 1127, in what became known as the Jingkang incident.

How they came to power: He became the eighth emperor of the Northern Song in 1100. His reign saw favourite eunuchs gain unprecedented power and left the disputes between reformers and conservatives unresolved.

How it ended: He abdicated in 1125 or 1126 in favour of his son Qinzong as the crisis mounted. Both were captured in 1127 and lived in exile in Manchuria, where Huizong died in 1135 at Yilan, in modern Heilongjiang.

• More than 14,000 captives, including much of the imperial family, were marched north after the sack, and many palace women took their own lives to avoid captivity and slavery.
• His son Zhao Gou escaped south and refounded the dynasty as the Southern Song, with its capital at Lin'an, now Hangzhou.
• The Song had been buying peace in the north since the Treaty of Shanyuan of 1005, which gave the Liao 100,000 taels of silver and 200,000 bolts of silk a year. In 1042 this rose to 200,000 taels and 300,000 bolts.

Sources: Encyclopaedia Britannica: Huizong; Columbia University, Asia for Educators: Rivals (Song Dynasty China); Encyclopaedia Britannica: Song dynasty; Wikipedia: Jingkang incident; Wikipedia: Chanyuan Treaty

Li Qingzhao (1084 to after 1155 (some sources c. 1151))

Li Qingzhao, Poet · Northern and Southern Song

Li Qingzhao is regarded as China's greatest woman poet, though only fragments of her work survive. She wrote mainly ci, song lyrics with irregular lines, and she mastered their metrical rules so fully that she produced one of the earliest known scholarly studies of the form. She wrote from her own experience, which gave her poems more emotional force than those of her peers. Her work is said to have run to seven volumes of essays and six of poetry. Columbia's Song module sets her beside a wider question: whether the status of women declined in this period.

How they rose: She was born in Shandong into a family of scholar-officials, and her father belonged to Su Shi's literary circle. She was writing admired poetry as a teenager, and in 1101 she married the antiquarian Zhao Mingcheng.

How they died: She reached Hangzhou by 1132 and fled to Jinhua two years later. She probably died there after 1155, though Wikipedia places her death at Shaoxing; the exact date is not known.

• The Jurchen conquest destroyed her settled life: their house in Shandong was burned, and Zhao died in 1129 during their flight south.
• She worked on completing the Catalogue of Inscriptions on Metal and Stone, the study of bronze and stone inscriptions begun with her husband.
• Her dates vary across reference works: Britannica says she died after 1155, while Columbia's Song module gives about 1151.

Sources: Encyclopaedia Britannica: Li Qingzhao; Columbia University, Asia for Educators: Confucian Revival and the Family (Song Dynasty China); Wikipedia: Li Qingzhao

Yue Fei (1103 to 27 January 1142)

Yue Fei, General · Southern Song

Yue Fei was the Song general who became China's model of patriotic loyalty. After the Jurchen overran the north and took Kaifeng, he retreated south with Emperor Gaozong and took command of Song forces. He exploited the difficulty the Jurchen cavalry had in the hilly south, and went on to recover some territory south of the Yangtze and Huai rivers. His plan to push north and retake everything ran into a peace party at court led by the minister Qin Hui, who argued that more war would cost too much. Qin Hui's faction won, and a treaty gave up the north.

How they rose: Born at Tangyin in Henan, he made his career in the wars that followed the Jurchen invasion of 1126. According to the chronicles he had been trained in archery, spear work and tactics.

How they died: He was imprisoned in 1141 and executed early the next year at Lin'an, now Hangzhou.

• Historical records and legend both tell that four characters meaning to serve the country with the utmost loyalty were tattooed on his back, and that he bared them when charged with treason.
• Claims that he learned hand-to-hand fighting from his teacher Zhou Tong, or that he is linked to particular martial arts styles, come from non-historical sources, not the chronicles.
• Qin Hui came to be viewed as a traitor, and since the early 20th century Yue Fei has been praised as a champion of resistance to foreign rule.

Sources: Encyclopaedia Britannica: Yue Fei; Columbia University, Asia for Educators: Rivals (Song Dynasty China); Wikipedia: Yue Fei

Zhu Xi (18 October 1130 to 23 April 1200)

Zhu Xi (Chu Hsi), Philosopher · Southern Song

Zhu Xi drew the ideas of earlier Song thinkers into the system known as Neo-Confucianism, partly in response to the challenge of Buddhist metaphysics. He taught that the cosmos has two aspects, li (principle) and qi (vital force), and that human nature is perfect in itself but clouded by impure qi. The way back was the investigation of things and steady moral cultivation. He singled out the Great Learning, the Analects, the Mencius and the Doctrine of the Mean as the Four Books, and wrote commentaries on all four. A practical manual of family ritual, translated by Patricia Ebrey as Chu Hsi's Family Rituals, is also credited to him.

How they rose: Son of a local official, he passed the highest civil service examination at 18. He held local office, and as prefect of Nankang in 1179 to 1181 he restored the White Deer Grotto Academy, a model for the academies that spread his movement.

How they died: His blunt attacks on corruption repeatedly cost him posts at court, and near the end his enemies had him barred from political activity. He died in disgrace in 1200, but honours followed in 1209 and 1230, and his tablet entered the Confucian Temple in 1241.

• His commentaries became required reading for anyone hoping to pass the civil service examinations, and his teaching remained state orthodoxy into the late 19th century.
• His influence reached far beyond China, into Korea and into Tokugawa Japan, where his ideas won official support.
• Family was central to the revival: Confucian teachers of the Song stressed filial piety and argued against the remarriage of widows.

Sources: Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Zhu Xi; Columbia University, Asia for Educators: Confucian Revival (Song Dynasty China); Encyclopaedia Britannica: Zhu Xi

The Mongol conquest of China (1211 to 1279)

Genghis Khan began the attack on the Jurchen Jin in 1211 and took their capital at Yanjing, now Beijing, in 1215. Conquering the south was far harder, because the Mongols had to build a navy to cross the Yangtze and mount huge logistical efforts. Campaigns against the Song were abandoned when the great khan Mongke died in 1259 and Kublai turned north to fight for the succession. Kublai's forces took Xiangyang after a five-year siege in 1273 and crossed the Yangtze in 1275. The last Song fleet was destroyed at Yamen, in southern China, on 19 March 1279.

• At Yamen the Song commander Zhang Shijie chained about 1,000 ships together around the child emperor Zhao Bing. When the line broke, the minister Lu Xiufu jumped into the sea with the boy and both drowned.
• Xiangyang's fall owed something to better catapults.
• The damage is still debated. Until the 1980s most scholars stressed Mongol destruction; the north did lose population, but Columbia's unit says earlier estimates of a catastrophic decline have since been revised.

Sources: Columbia University, Asia for Educators: The Mongols in China; Columbia University, Asia for Educators: Military Campaigns (The Mongols in China); Encyclopaedia Britannica: Yuan dynasty; World History Encyclopedia: Kublai Khan; Wikipedia: Battle of Yamen

Kublai Khan (1215 to 1294 (some sources 1214); reigned 1260 to 1294)

Kublai (Khubilai, Qubilai); temple name Shizu; called Setsen, the Wise Khan, by the Mongols, Yuan dynasty · Dadu (Beijing) and Shangdu (Xanadu)

Kublai was the first non-Chinese ruler of all China and the Mongol who most clearly tried to rule rather than merely conquer. He named his dynasty Yuan in 1271, completed the conquest of the Song in 1279, and built his capital at Dadu, now Beijing, with a summer capital at Shangdu, the Xanadu of legend. He kept China's Six Ministries and its provincial structure, restored court rituals and founded ancestral temples. Yet his government also ranked its subjects in four classes with southern Chinese at the bottom, and native Chinese could not hold some of the top offices.

How they came to power: A grandson of Genghis Khan and son of Tolui and Sorghaghtani Beki, he fought the Song under his brother Mongke. When Mongke died in 1259 he declared himself khan in 1260, and he defeated his rival brother Arigboge in 1264.

How it ended: He died in 1294 of illness made worse, according to World History Encyclopedia, by heavy eating and drinking. His tomb has never been found.

• His two naval attacks on Japan, in 1274 and 1281, were wrecked largely by weather. The Japanese called the typhoon of 1281 the kamikaze, the 'divine wind'. A further expedition to Java in 1292 also failed.
• He made paper money the sole medium of exchange, and one of his Chinese advisers warned him that an empire could be conquered on horseback but not governed from one.
• He and his adviser, the Tibetan monk 'Phags-pa, are credited with the 'dual principle' theory, which gave religion and the state equal power and dignity, and it shaped later Mongolian history.

Sources: Columbia University, Asia for Educators: The Mongols in China; Columbia University, Asia for Educators: Mongol Rule in China (Khubilai's policies); Columbia University, Asia for Educators: Military Campaigns (The Mongols in China); Encyclopaedia Britannica: Kublai Khan; World History Encyclopedia: Kublai Khan

Marco Polo in China (claims debated) (1254 to 1324; in China c. 1275 to 1291/92 by his own account)

Marco Polo, Venetian merchant and traveller · Yuan China

Marco Polo was a Venetian merchant whose book says he was in China from about 1275 to 1291 and served Kublai Khan, claims that remain debated, since David Morgan notes that no Chinese source mentions him. His account of Hangzhou's markets, coal and paper money caused a sensation in Europe, and modern studies support details such as his account of currency. Some in the Middle Ages treated the book as a romance, and doubts have continued ever since. Sceptics, including Frances Wood of the British Library, point out that he never mentions the Great Wall, tea, Chinese characters, chopsticks or foot binding. Supporters answer that the Great Wall familiar today is a Ming structure built later, and that his details on currency and salt production are accurate and found in no other non-Chinese source.

How they rose: By his own account he reached China with his father and uncle. Scholars estimate the arrival at between 1271 and 1275, and his book is the chief account of his career there.

How they died: He fought for Venice against Genoa, was captured in 1296 or 1298, and dictated his story in prison to Rustichello of Pisa. He died in Venice in 1324, aged about 70.

• He called Hangzhou 'beyond dispute the finest and the noblest in the world' (Henry Yule's translation, 1903), and credited it with 12,000 stone bridges, a figure to be read with caution.
• A legend says that on his deathbed he was urged to admit that his book was all tall tales, and replied that he had not told half of what he saw. It is a legend and cannot be verified.
• Stephen Haw and others point out that many things he omits, such as tea and chopsticks, go unmentioned by other foreign travellers of the time as well, and that foot binding may not yet have been widespread. Some claims do fail: the book has the Polos advising on siege engines at Xiangyang, which fell in 1273 before Marco arrived, and the Chinese annals, as Yule summarised them, name two Muslim engineers sent from Persia.

Sources: Fordham Internet History Sourcebooks: Marco Polo: On the Tartars (editor's introduction and text); Columbia University, Asia for Educators: Marco Polo (excerpts from Yule's translation); Columbia University, Asia for Educators: Hangzhou (Song Dynasty China, quoting Yule, 1903); World History Encyclopedia: Marco Polo; Wikipedia: Marco Polo

The Red Turbans and the fall of the Yuan (1351 to 1368)

By the 1340s the Yuan government was weakened by factions and failing finances, and it could no longer maintain the public works that earlier dynasties had kept up. Terrible floods shifted the course of the Yellow River and left many people homeless. In 1351 the state mobilised 150,000 workers to rechannel the river, and the Red Turban leader Han Shantong and his adviser Liu Futong recruited among them. The movement expected the coming of the Maitreya Buddha, who would end suffering, and it opposed Mongol rule. In the end it was Zhu Yuanzhang, a former monk who joined the Red Turbans in 1352 under Guo Zixing and later beat his rebel rivals, who drove the Mongols out of Beijing in 1368 and founded the Ming.

• Han Shantong's son Han Lin'er was proclaimed emperor of a restored Song dynasty at Bozhou on 16 March 1355, and the rebels briefly took the old capital Kaifeng in 1358.
• Their raids reached as far as Korea, where they contributed to the downfall of the Koryo dynasty.
• The last Yuan emperor, Togon-temur, fled north. The Yuan court survived on the steppe, and historians call its continuation the Northern Yuan.

Sources: Encyclopaedia Britannica: Red Turbans; Columbia University, Asia for Educators: Public Works Failures (The Mongols in China); Encyclopaedia Britannica: Yuan dynasty; Wikipedia: Red Turban Rebellions

Empress Ma (empress 1368 to 1382 (born 1332))

Empress Xiaocigao, surnamed Ma (personal name unrecorded in official sources; often given as Ma Xiuying), Empress · Ming dynasty, Nanjing

Ma was the adopted daughter of the rebel leader Guo Zixing and married Zhu Yuanzhang, the future Hongwu Emperor, in 1352. The official History of Ming says she kept his notes and records for him, sewed clothes and shoes for his soldiers, and handed out palace gold and silk to reward troops when Chen Youliang attacked. As empress she is credited with restraining a ruler known for his temper, by raising cases privately after he left the audience hall. Her biography says that she told him the empire should be won by not killing people.

How they rose: Her father, a friend of Guo Zixing, left her in Guo's care and died; Guo raised her as his own and married her to Zhu, a rising officer in his army. She was named empress when Zhu took the throne in the first month of 1368.

How they died: She fell ill in 1382 and, by the traditional account, refused doctors and prayers so that physicians would not be blamed if treatment failed. She died in September 1382 and the emperor named no other empress.

• When the scholar Song Lian was condemned over his grandson's crime, the History of Ming says she refused wine and meat at the emperor's table as a pious act for the old teacher; he was spared the next day and sent to Maozhou.
• She told the emperor, in the same text, that a couple protecting each other is easy but a ruler and ministers protecting each other is hard, when he compared her to the Tang empress Zhangsun.
• The story of the hot cake that burned her skin comes from the History of Ming, compiled long after her death, so her portrait there is the model of a virtuous empress as well as a record.

Sources: History of Ming (Ming shi), chapter 113, Biographies of Empresses and Consorts, Chinese text on Wikisource; Wikipedia: Empress Ma (Hongwu); Britannica (David B. Chan): Hongwu

Hongwu Emperor (Zhu Yuanzhang) (reigned 1368 to 1398 (born 1328))

Zhu Yuanzhang (Chu Yuan-chang), born Zhu Chongba; reign title Hongwu, temple name Taizu, Ming dynasty · Nanjing

Zhu Yuanzhang proclaimed the Ming dynasty at the start of 1368 with his capital at Nanjing, and by August his generals had entered the Yuan capital Dadu, the later Beijing. Unification was finished by 1382. He abolished the Secretariat in 1380, which removed a bureaucratic check on the throne, registered land and taxes in detail and redistributed farmland to peasants after years of war. He also brought back the civil service examinations in 1370 and curbed foreign trade. His purges were large: the History of Ming gives over 30,000 dead in the case of the chancellor Hu Weiyong, which began in 1380 (other accounts say 15,000 or 40,000), and 15,000 in the later Lan Yu case.

How they came to power: Orphaned at 16, he entered a monastery near Fengyang and wandered as a beggar, then joined the rebel Guo Zixing in 1352 and took over his army in 1355. He captured Nanjing in 1356, destroyed Chen Youliang's fleet on Lake Poyang in 1363 and defeated Zhang Shicheng in 1367.

How it ended: He died at Nanjing on 24 June 1398. His chosen heir Zhu Biao had died in 1392, so the throne passed to Biao's son, the Jianwen Emperor, who lost it in a civil war within four years.

• Scholars of the Yangtze delta taught him Chinese history and the Confucian classics after he joined the rebellion, and they persuaded him to present himself as a national leader against the Mongols rather than as a popular rebel.
• In an edict translated in Patricia Ebrey's sourcebook he accuses officials of stealing money and grain, and says he punishes them with death, forced labour or flogging so that the results of good and evil are plain.
• A manifesto of his fourth year, sent to the distant land the Chinese called Fu-lin (Byzantium), calls him a simple peasant of Huai-yu who had restored the old boundaries of China after a century of Mongol rule.

Sources: Asia for Educators (Columbia University): An Imperial Edict Restraining Officials from Evil, by the Hongwu Emperor; Fordham East Asian History Sourcebook: Manifesto of Accession as First Ming Emperor; Britannica (David B. Chan): Hongwu; World History Encyclopedia (Mark Cartwright): Hongwu Emperor; Wikipedia: Hu Weiyong

Ming blue-and-white porcelain and Jingdezhen (imperial kiln factory founded c. 1369; exports through the Ming dynasty)

The Imperial Kiln Factory at Zhushan in Jingdezhen was set up, some scholars say in 1369 under the Hongwu Emperor, and worked only for the court, beside a separate world of private kilns. Blue-and-white ware was painted with cobalt oxide brought from Central Asia, particularly Iran, then glazed and fired at very high heat. Early designs followed the tastes of Arab buyers, while later ones favoured birds, flowers and, by the 16th century, multi-coloured scenes with figures. Porcelain became a major export, and it was often exchanged for Spanish silver arriving through Manila.

• Kilns ran so constantly that Jingdezhen was known as the town of year-round thunder and lightning, according to World History Encyclopedia.
• By the 18th century the town had about 100,000 workers, and one piece might pass through the hands of 70 people before it was finished.
• Europeans learned the secrets of making porcelain only in the 18th century, which is one reason fine white ware from China held its value and fame for so long.

Sources: World History Encyclopedia (Mark Cartwright): Ming Porcelain; Wikipedia: Jingdezhen porcelain; World History Encyclopedia (Mark Cartwright): Ming Taxation and the Silver Economy; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Heilbrunn Timeline: Ming Dynasty (1368-1644)

Yongle Emperor (Zhu Di) (reigned 1402 to 1424 (born 1360))

Zhu Di (Chu Ti), Prince of Yan; reign title Yongle, temple name Chengzu, Ming dynasty · Nanjing and Beijing

Zhu Di, a son of the Hongwu Emperor, commanded the northern frontier as Prince of Yan and took the throne in 1402 after a civil war. He moved the capital from Nanjing to Beijing, formally in 1421, enlarged the city and had the Grand Canal revived so that southern grain could reach it by boat. He sent Zheng He's fleets overseas, invaded Vietnam in 1406 and led five campaigns against the Mongols himself. Asia for Educators notes that critics at court attacked these costs, and Vietnam regained its independence about twenty years after the invasion.

How they came to power: The throne passed over him to his nephew, the Jianwen Emperor, in 1398. Zhu Di revolted, and after about three years of war took Nanjing and became emperor in 1402; Jianwen vanished, and his fate is unknown.

How it ended: He died on 12 August 1424 at Yumuchuan during his fifth campaign against the Mongols, aged 64, and was buried in the Chang Mausoleum at the Ming Tombs near Beijing.

• The scholar Fang Xiaoru refused to draft the new emperor's enthronement proclamation and was executed by dismemberment; World History Encyclopedia says the purge that followed, reaching his relatives and associates, killed thousands.
• In 1420 he founded the Eastern Depot, a security bureau headed by his chief eunuch, to hunt for opposition and corruption, and eunuchs gained power under him.
• His archivists all but blanked out the Jianwen reign and altered records to support his claim to the throne, according to World History Encyclopedia.

Sources: World History Encyclopedia (Mark Cartwright): Yongle Emperor; Asia for Educators (Columbia University): The Ming Voyages; Britannica (Jung-pang Lo): Zheng He; Wikipedia: Yongle Emperor

The Yongle Encyclopedia (commissioned 1403, completed by 1408)

The Yongle Emperor ordered the encyclopedia in 1403 and rejected a first version finished by a team of 100 scholars under Xie Jin in 1404. The staff then grew to 2,169, with the monk Yao Guangxiao as general editor. The finished manuscript had 22,937 rolls in 11,095 volumes. After a fire in 1557 nearly destroyed the book, the Jiajing Emperor ordered a duplicate; work began in 1562 and ended in 1567. Fewer than 400 volumes survive, about 3.5 percent of the work.

• The fate of the original copy is unknown; suggestions include destruction in the fire when Li Zicheng left Beijing in 1644, or burial with the Jiajing Emperor, but nothing has settled the question.
• Anglo-French troops burned and looted the later copy in 1860, and the surviving volumes shrank to about 800 by 1894 by Wikipedia's count, or 600 to 800 by 1893 by the Library of Congress's. Soldiers took hundreds more in 1900, and many were destroyed in the fire at the Hanlin Academy.
• The work ran to 370 million characters by one estimate. An attempt to print it soon after completion was abandoned because of the cost, says the Library of Congress, so it existed only in three manuscript sets.

Sources: Britannica: Yongle dadian; Wikipedia: Yongle Encyclopedia; World History Encyclopedia (Mark Cartwright): Yongle Emperor; Library of Congress blog: Yongle Encyclopedia volumes fully digitized

Zheng He (Cheng Ho) and the treasure fleets (voyages 1405 to 1433 (born c. 1371, died 1433))

Zheng He (Cheng Ho), born Ma He, also called Ma Sanbao, Admiral and court eunuch · Ming dynasty

Between 1405 and 1433 Zheng He commanded seven expeditions into the Indian Ocean, reaching Southeast Asia, Calicut, Hormuz, Arabia and East Africa. The first left with 317 ships, perhaps as many as 60 of them great treasure ships, and nearly 28,000 men by Asia for Educators' count; The History of Ming counts 62 treasure ships and 27,800 men on the first voyage. The fleets carried silk and porcelain to show off Ming power and to pull distant states into the tribute system, and on his return in 1415 he brought envoys of more than 30 states to the court. The Hongxi Emperor suspended the voyages in 1424, and after a last expedition in 1431 they never resumed.

How they rose: Born to a Hui family in Yunnan, whose father had made the pilgrimage to Mecca, he was captured at about age 10 when Ming armies took Yunnan in 1381, and castrated. He served the Prince of Yan and rose with him; when the prince became the Yongle Emperor he gave him the surname Zheng and made him commander of the western missions.

How they died: He died about 1433, during the seventh voyage (Calicut is often named as the place, but this is disputed), and the fleet came home that summer.

• The size of the treasure ships is disputed: Asia for Educators repeats a figure of over 400 feet long, while World History Encyclopedia says perhaps up to 55 metres (180 feet) and notes that the exact dimensions are contested.
• African animals reached China on the voyages, and a surviving painting shows a giraffe sent by the ruler of Bengal, an animal taken at court as evidence of the mythical qilin.
• When another voyage was suggested in 1477, a vice president of the Ministry of War confiscated Zheng's records from the archives, as Asia for Educators recounts, and dismissed them as deceitful exaggerations.

Sources: Asia for Educators (Columbia University): The Ming Voyages; Britannica (Jung-pang Lo): Zheng He; World History Encyclopedia (Mark Cartwright): The Seven Voyages of Zheng He; Wikipedia: Ming treasure voyages

The Forbidden City (built 1406 to 1420; political centre until 1912, with Puyi living in the inner court until 1924)

The Yongle Emperor commissioned the palace at the heart of Beijing in 1406, and the court first occupied it officially in 1420. The compound covers 72 hectares and is laid out along a north-south axis, with its main buildings facing south. It saw the enthronement of 14 Ming and 10 Qing emperors over about 505 years, according to UNESCO. Asia for Educators says the work took over a million labourers. UNESCO listed it as a World Heritage Site in 1987, and the Palace Museum has run it since 1925.

• The traditional count of 9,999 rooms is not accurate; a modern survey cited by Wikipedia found 8,886, while UNESCO says nearly 10,000.
• Wikipedia says the number of statuettes on a roof ridge marks a building's status, and that the penalty for unauthorised entry to the palace was immediate execution.
• UNESCO dates its time as the seat of supreme power from 1416 to 1911, slightly different from the 1420 to 1912 implied by its completion and the last emperor's abdication.

Sources: UNESCO World Heritage Centre: Imperial Palaces of the Ming and Qing Dynasties in Beijing and Shenyang; Asia for Educators (Columbia University): The Ming Voyages; Wikipedia: Forbidden City; The Palace Museum: About the Palace Museum

The Tumu Crisis (battle 1 September 1449; emperor returned September 1450; restored February 1457)

In 1449 the Oirat leader Esen invaded, and the eunuch Wang Zhen persuaded the Zhengtong Emperor to lead an army against him in person; it is often put at about half a million men, though Wikipedia notes the real number is unknown and may have been much smaller. Poorly supplied and slowed by rain, it was surrounded at Tumu and destroyed, Wang Zhen died and the emperor was taken prisoner. The war minister Yu Qian opposed Xu Youzhen's advice to flee south, and the court stayed in Beijing, enthroned the emperor's brother as the Jingtai Emperor and fortified the city. Esen failed before Beijing and released his captive in 1450, and a palace coup of February 1457 restored him under the reign name Tianshun.

• Wikipedia gives Esen's own force as only about 20,000, far smaller than the Ming army, and adds that he was not prepared for so large a victory or for capturing an emperor.
• Because a new emperor was on the throne, the captive lost his value as a hostage; Esen could not expect much ransom, as the EBSCO account puts it.
• The returned emperor renounced his claim on coming home in 1450, and then lived in isolation until the coup led by his supporter Xu Youzhen.

Sources: EBSCO Research Starters (Thomas McGeary): Restoration of Zhengtong; Wikipedia: Tumu Crisis; Asia for Educators (Columbia University): The Ming Voyages

Wang Yangming (1472 to 1529)

Wang Yangming (Wang Yang-ming), Philosopher and general · Ming dynasty

Wang Yangming challenged the teachings of Zhu Xi, which by his time had become a stale orthodoxy studied for the examinations, according to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. He argued that principle is found in one's own mind, developing the line of thought associated with Lu Xiangshan. His best-known teaching was the unity of knowing and acting: on his account a person truly knows filial piety only when acting on it. He was also a commander, who cleared bandits from Jiangxi in 1517 to 1518 and captured the rebel Prince of Ning in 1519. His followers recorded his conversations in the Chuanxilu (Instructions for Practical Living), and his thought influenced East Asia for centuries.

How they rose: The son of a high official, he failed the metropolitan examination in 1493 and 1495 and passed in 1499. In 1506 he defended a censor imprisoned for attacking a powerful eunuch, and he was given 40 strokes and banished to Guizhou, where his breakthrough came around age 36.

How they died: Sent to crush a rebellion in Guangxi in 1527, he succeeded within six months but grew very ill with a long-standing cough, and died on the way back at Nan'an in Jiangxi in 1529. His earldom and other privileges were afterwards revoked.

• As a young man he sat in front of some bamboo for seven days trying to discern its principle as he understood Zhu Xi to teach, and fell ill.
• On the day his betrothal gifts were sent, says his disciples' chronicle (Britannica says his wedding night), he was so absorbed in talking with a Daoist priest about longevity that he stayed at the temple all night.
• As a magistrate in Jiangxi he introduced a joint registration system in which ten families shared responsibility for security, and later a community compact to improve local morals.

Sources: Asia for Educators (Columbia University): Wang Yangming on the Unity of Knowing and Acting; Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Wang Yangming; Britannica: Wang Yangming; Wikipedia: Wang Yangming

The Ming Great Wall (and its myths) (Ordos wall completed 1474; major brick building into the late 1500s)

UNESCO says the Great Wall became the world's largest military structure under the Ming, and most of the wall that visitors see today is their work rather than the First Emperor's. After offensive war against the Mongols became too costly, Yu Zijun proposed a wall in the Ordos region in 1471 and completed it in 1474. In 1567 the generals Qi Jiguang and Tan Lun proposed 3,000 brick towers along the capital's defences. A modern survey cited by Wikipedia measured the Ming walls at 8,850 km, and World History Encyclopedia counts over 25,000 watchtowers. It did not save the dynasty: in 1644 the general Wu Sangui opened the wall to the Manchus.

• Legend: Meng Jiangnu wept so bitterly for her husband, conscripted for the wall, that it collapsed and revealed his bones. Folklorists have traced the tale over about 2,000 years, and later versions set it under the Qin.
• Myth: the wall is not visible from the moon, and NASA says it is difficult or impossible to see from Earth orbit without high-powered lenses. World History Encyclopedia traces the claim to a line by Sir Henry Norman in 1895.
• A temple to Lady Meng Jiang was built or rebuilt in 1594 at the eastern end of the Ming wall near Qinhuangdao, and it still stands; it is evidence of the legend's popularity, not of the story.

Sources: UNESCO World Heritage Centre: The Great Wall; NASA: Great Wall (image article, Expedition 10); World History Encyclopedia (Emily Mark): Great Wall of China; Wikipedia: Ming Great Wall; Wikipedia: Lady Meng Jiang

The great Ming novels (16th century to c. 1610)

Fiction in vernacular Chinese reached a new height under the Ming, with Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Water Margin, Journey to the West and The Plum in the Golden Vase. Early Qing publishers grouped these four and promoted them as the Four Masterworks. Journey to the West, in 100 chapters, sends a resourceful monkey with the Buddhist monk Xuanzang on his way to India, and it satirises Chinese society along the way. The Plum in the Golden Vase (Jin Ping Mei), first published about 1610 under the pen name The Scoffing Scholar of Lanling, is a story of one household told with frank sexual detail.

• Wu Cheng'en (c. 1500 to c. 1582) is traditionally credited as the author of Journey to the West, and Britannica says that he had a lifelong interest in bizarre stories and folktales that formed the basis of the novel.
• The true author of The Plum in the Golden Vase remains unknown, since the name on it is a pseudonym, and it is set in the years 1111 to 1127, under the Song.
• The novel rests on an actual 7th-century pilgrimage: the Buddhist monk Xuanzang (602 to 664) really did travel to India in search of sacred texts, and Britannica calls the book the foremost Chinese comic novel.

Sources: Britannica: Wu Cheng'en; Britannica: Xiyouji (Journey to the West); Wikipedia: Classic Chinese Novels; Wikipedia: Jin Ping Mei; Wu Cheng'en (attributed), Journey to the West (Xiyouji), Chinese text on Wikisource

Li Shizhen (1518 to 1593; Compendium completed 1578, printed 1596)

Li Shizhen (Li Shih-chen), courtesy name Dongbi, Physician and naturalist · Ming dynasty, Qizhou in Hubei

Li Shizhen compiled the Bencao gangmu (Compendium of Materia Medica), completed in 1578 and printed in Nanjing in 1596. It described 1,892 drugs, most of them herbs, with animal and mineral drugs as well, and gave directions for about 11,000 prescriptions. Britannica notes that it covers distillation and the uses of mercury, ephedrine and iodine, and even smallpox inoculation. A revised edition of the 1600s had more than 1,100 illustrations.

How they rose: Born at Qizhou in Hubei, he came from a family with a doctor in it, and he suffered eye disease as a child. He gained a post at the Imperial Medical Institute in Beijing, according to Wikipedia, but left it; the History of Ming records him as an official in the household of the Prince of Chu.

How they died: He died in 1593 before he could present the book to the throne. The History of Ming says his son Li Jianyuan later submitted it with his father's memorial, and the emperor ordered it printed, though Wikipedia says the emperor paid it little attention and that the first printing, at Nanjing in 1596, had begun in 1593.

• The History of Ming says he worked for 30 years, read over 800 authors and wrote three drafts, adding 374 drugs and arranging the book in 16 sections and 52 chapters; Wikipedia's page on Li gives 27 years, and its page on the book more than three decades.
• Much of the work is compilation: he drew on hundreds of earlier books in the Chinese pharmacology tradition as well as his own observation.
• The book covers plants, animals and minerals believed to have medical properties, so it is also a major work of natural history.

Sources: History of Ming (Ming shi), chapter 299, Chinese text on Wikisource; Britannica: Li Shizhen; Britannica: Bencao gangmu; Wikipedia: Li Shizhen; Wikipedia: Bencao Gangmu

The wokou raiders and Qi Jiguang (raids on China in the 15th and 16th centuries, heaviest under the Jiajing Emperor (reigned 1521 to 1567))

Wokou (Japanese wako) means roughly 'dwarf pirates', a term applied to raiders from Japan and also to Chinese, Korean and Portuguese mariners. From the 15th and 16th centuries they targeted the Chinese coast, seizing grain, cloth and tribute goods, sometimes with fleets of up to 400 ships and raiding parties of 3,000. World History Encyclopedia says feudal lords in all three countries could profit from them when legal trade broke down, and notes that many, perhaps most, in the 16th century were Chinese. The general Qi Jiguang was promoted in 1553 to a command in Shandong's defence against them, and he and Yu Dayou became the best-known commanders against the raiders.

• Qi Jiguang (1528 to 1588) wrote the military manuals Jixiao Xinshu and Lianbing Shiji from his experience of training soldiers. He is also remembered for reinforcing the Great Wall.
• Wang Zhi, a wokou merchant executed in January 1560 (late 1559 by the Chinese calendar), helped the Portuguese talk with a local lord when they landed in Japan at Tanegashima in 1543.
• The official History of Ming itself says that, around the raids of 1555, roughly three in ten of the raiders were true Japanese and seven in ten their followers; a censor's memorial of 1553, cited by Wikipedia, says most came from Fujian and Ningbo.

Sources: History of Ming (Ming shi), chapter 322, on Japan, Chinese text on Wikisource; World History Encyclopedia (Mark Cartwright): Wako, The Medieval Pirates of Southeast Asia; Wikipedia: Wokou; Wikipedia: Qi Jiguang

Silver, the Manila galleons and New World crops (Manila trade from 1565; through the end of the Ming)

Ming China had curbed foreign trade under Hongwu, but by the 16th century it had become one of the great consumers of world silver. Spanish galleons from the 1560s joined East Asia to Acapulco through Manila: Asian silk and spices went east, and silver came back to pay for the next voyage. Portuguese traders at Macao, held from 1557, carried Japanese silver to China too, about 20 metric tons a year according to Patricia Ebrey, as quoted by World History Encyclopedia. New crops followed, among them the sweet potato around 1560, maize and peanuts, and these grew on land unsuited to native crops. Over the dynasty's life the population rose from 60-80 million to 150-200 million, by World History Encyclopedia's estimate.

• Ebrey's figure, quoted by World History Encyclopedia, is that China absorbed 50 percent of the silver mined in Mexico and Bolivia through this trade; Columbia's Asia for Educators gives at least a third, and perhaps over 40 percent, of Mexican and Peruvian silver from 1500 to 1800.
• Silver's value was so much higher in China than Europe in the 16th century that an ounce of gold bought about 11 ounces of silver in Amsterdam, and the same silver could be swapped in China for 2 ounces of gold.
• When the supply of silver weakened in the 17th century, the shortage helped bring on the fall of the Ming, according to the same article.

Sources: World History Encyclopedia (Mark Cartwright): Ming Taxation and the Silver Economy; World History Encyclopedia (Mark Cartwright): Ming Dynasty; Wikipedia: Manila galleon; Wikipedia: Economy of the Ming dynasty; Asia for Educators (Columbia University): The Silver Trade, Part 1

Wanli Emperor and Zhang Juzheng (reigned 1572 to 1620 (born 1563))

Zhu Yijun; reign title Wanli, temple name Shenzong, Ming dynasty · Beijing

Wanli came to the throne as a child in 1572, and for his first decade the Grand Secretary Zhang Juzheng (1525 to 1582) ran the state. Zhang ordered a new land survey in 1578, with results due by about 1581, and he is credited with the Single Whip tax, imposed from 1581 and paid in silver. In 1584, two years after Zhang's death, the emperor had his family's property confiscated and sent his sons to the border garrisons. A dispute over the succession from 1586 to 1614, when he favoured the son of Lady Zheng over his eldest, left him at odds with his officials, and he retreated from court affairs. Three major campaigns fell in the 1590s, among them the suppression of a rebellion in Ningxia in 1592 and the war in Korea.

How they came to power: He succeeded his father, the Longqing Emperor, in 1572 as a boy, with Zhang Juzheng soon becoming the leading minister.

How it ended: He died on 18 August 1620 in the Forbidden City, aged 56, and was buried in the Ding Mausoleum at the Ming Tombs.

• The Single Whip combined land and labour dues into one payment, based on the area of land owned, and it stayed in use well into the Qing dynasty.
• Wikipedia says that from 1588 he cut back contact with officials, and that he stopped attending public sacrifices after 1591 and abandoned the early morning audiences.
• Matteo Ricci entered Beijing in January 1601, during his reign, and stayed until his death in 1610.

Sources: History of Ming (Ming shi), chapter 21, Annals of the Shenzong Emperor, Chinese text on Wikisource; World History Encyclopedia (Mark Cartwright): Ming Taxation and the Silver Economy; Wikipedia: Wanli Emperor; Wikipedia: Zhang Juzheng; Britannica (Joseph Hsing-san Shih): Matteo Ricci

Matteo Ricci (in China 1582 to 1610 (born 1552))

Matteo Ricci, Chinese name Li Madou (利瑪竇), Jesuit missionary · Italy and Ming China

Ricci reached Macau in August 1582, began at once to learn Chinese, and settled the next year at Zhaoqing with Michele Ruggieri. He made a map of the world, the Great Map of Ten Thousand Countries, which showed Chinese scholars how China related to the rest of the globe. On the advice of the scholar Qu Taisu he dropped his monk's habit to dress as a Confucian scholar. He entered Beijing in January 1601 and never left, writing books in Chinese including a translation of the first six books of Euclid in 1607.

How they rose: Born to a noble family in Macerata, he studied law in Rome, joined the Jesuits in 1571 and studied science under Christopher Clavius. He was ordered from Goa to China in 1582 as part of Alessandro Valignano's new strategy of adapting to local language and culture.

How they died: He died in Beijing on 11 May 1610, aged 57. Ming rules required foreigners who died in China to be buried in Macau, but his grave is in Beijing's Zhalan Cemetery.

• His converts and collaborators included Xu Guangqi, Li Zhizao and Yang Tingyun, later called the Three Pillars of the early Catholic Church in China.
• A memorial of 1617 attributed to Xu Guangqi (Hsu Kuang-chi), reproduced in the Fordham sourcebook, defends the foreigners' sciences as correct, showing the Jesuits still had allies after Ricci's death.
• Pope Francis declared him Venerable in 2022, a first step in the Catholic process of canonisation.

Sources: Fordham Modern History Sourcebook: Hsu Kuang-chi, Memorial to Fra Matteo Ricci, 1617; Britannica (Joseph Hsing-san Shih): Matteo Ricci; Wikipedia: Matteo Ricci

The war in Korea against Hideyoshi (1592 to 1598, with a truce from 1596)

In 1592 Toyotomi Hideyoshi, having unified Japan, sent an invasion to Korea with China as his larger target; World History Encyclopedia gives 158,000 samurai and 9,200 mariners. Korean armies collapsed at first, then Admiral Yi Sun-sin's navy cut Japanese supply lines. Ming China sent troops to help its ally, about 48,000 in the first phase and 75,000 to 80,000 in the second, according to figures on Wikipedia. A truce in 1596 gave way to a second invasion in 1597, and the war ended in 1598 after Hideyoshi's death and the Battle of Noryang.

• Wikipedia lists the outcome as a Joseon and Ming victory with the borders left unchanged, so that Japan gained no territory for six years of war.
• World History Encyclopedia says the expensive wars against the Mongols and Japanese in Korea sent the Ming economy into a dive, part of the dynasty's later financial troubles.
• The History of Ming dates the landing at Busan to the fifth month of the 20th year of Wanli, while Wikipedia gives the 13th day of the fourth month (23 May 1592). The History calls the Ming negotiator Shen Weijing, who dealt with the Japanese commander Konishi Yukinaga, a rogue from the marketplace.

Sources: History of Ming (Ming shi), chapter 320, on Korea, Chinese text on Wikisource; World History Encyclopedia (Mark Cartwright): Toyotomi Hideyoshi; World History Encyclopedia (Mark Cartwright): Ming Dynasty; Wikipedia: Imjin War

Li Zicheng and the fall of the Ming (Chongzhen reign 1628 to 1644; Beijing fell in April 1644)

From the 1620s falling temperatures, floods, drought and famine struck China, while the state was already weakened by overspending and faction. Li Zicheng (born 1605 or 1606, died 1645), from a poor Shaanxi family, joined the rebels around 1630 and won a large following by calling for the equal distribution of land. In 1644 he proclaimed the Great Shun dynasty and marched on Beijing. The Chongzhen Emperor killed members of his family with his sword and, on 25 April, died on Meishan hill, now Jingshan Park, by hanging or strangling himself; the general Wu Sangui then brought in the Manchus, and the combined force drove Li out.

• The History of Ming says the emperor wrote on the lapel of his robe that he had offended Heaven through lack of virtue but that his ministers had misled him, and that the eunuch Wang Cheng'en died with him.
• Li died in 1645 in Hubei after fleeing the capital; World History Encyclopedia says that he was killed by peasants, while Wikipedia says the circumstances remain unclear.
• Wikipedia says the gates of Beijing were opened from the inside, and the History of Ming records the eunuch Du Xun going over to Li at Xuanfu that same month.

Sources: History of Ming (Ming shi), chapter 24, Annals of the Zhuanglie Emperor, Chinese text on Wikisource; World History Encyclopedia (Mark Cartwright): Ming Dynasty; Wikipedia: Chongzhen Emperor; Wikipedia: Li Zicheng

Nurhaci (Nurhachi) (khan 1616 to 1626 (born 1559))

Nurhaci, khan with the reign title Tianming; later honoured as Taizu of the Qing, Later Jin · Manchuria

Nurhaci, chief of the Jianzhou Juchen in Manchuria, turned a tribal society into a state that could challenge the Ming. A scholar named Erdeni created a Manchu script under his direction in 1599, and in 1601 he founded the banner system, units that were at once military, administrative and tax-gathering. He grew rich on mining, pearls, fur and ginseng, and he travelled to Beijing himself with tribute missions. In 1616 he proclaimed himself khan of a dynasty he called Jin, or Later Jin, and in 1618 he attacked Ming China and took the border city of Fushun.

How they came to power: Called to leadership in his early twenties after his father and grandfather were killed, he defeated a Ming-backed rival in 1586 and destroyed the other Juchen states one by one. The Ming had fostered such rivalries to keep the border tribes weak.

How it ended: He moved his capital to Shenyang in 1625 and was defeated for the first time at Ningyuan in February 1626. He died of his wounds on 30 September 1626, by Britannica's account.

• He set out his case in 1618 in a document called the Seven Grievances, most of which, says Wikipedia, concerned conflict with the rival Yehe and Ming favour toward them.
• His border victories drew Chinese into Manchu service: the commander of Fushun, Li Yongfang, defected to him, and others followed.
• UNESCO credits him with beginning the palace at Shenyang, built from 1625 and now a World Heritage Site paired with the Forbidden City.

Sources: Britannica: Nurhachi; UNESCO World Heritage Centre: Imperial Palaces of the Ming and Qing Dynasties in Beijing and Shenyang; Wikipedia: Nurhaci

Dorgon and the Manchu conquest (regent 1643 to 1650; entered Beijing June 1644 (born 1612))

Dorgon, Prince Rui, regent to the Shunzhi Emperor, Regent · Qing dynasty, Beijing

Dorgon, the 14th son of Nurhaci, was regent for the six-year-old Fulin when Li Zicheng's rebels took Beijing in April 1644. He led an army into China, the Ming general Wu Sangui joined him, and together they defeated Li. Dorgon entered Beijing in June, and Fulin, on the throne since 1643, was enthroned there in November. Over the next years Qing armies took province after province as Ming loyalists were pushed into the southwest, while he kept the Chinese administrative system and recruited officials through examinations. He also required Han Chinese men to shave the front of the head and wear a queue in the Manchu way.

How they rose: He fought the Chahar Mongols in 1628 and 1635 under his brother Hong Taiji. On Hong Taiji's death in 1643 he contested the succession with Hong Taiji's son Hooge; the child Fulin took the throne with Dorgon and Jirgalang as co-regents, and Dorgon later sidelined Jirgalang.

How they died: He died during a hunt at Kharahotun near the Great Wall at the end of 1650, aged 39 by the Draft History of Qing and 38 by Wikipedia. He was named emperor after death, but in 1651 he was condemned as a usurper and his honours were revoked.

• In June 1645, says Wikipedia, he decreed that official documents should call him Imperial Uncle Prince Regent.
• The Draft History of Qing says he was raised to Imperial Father Prince Regent in 1648, and it records the charge after his death that he had copied imperial style.
• Wu Sangui, whose troops fought Li Zicheng's army for hours before Dorgon intervened, would rebel against the dynasty he helped install, three decades later.

Sources: Draft History of Qing (Qing shi gao), chapter 218, Chinese text on Wikisource; Britannica: Kangxi; Wikipedia: Dorgon; Wikipedia: Shunzhi Emperor

Kangxi Emperor (reigned 1661 to 1722 (born 1654))

Xuanye; reign title Kangxi (Manchu Elhe Taifin), Qing dynasty · Beijing

Kangxi reigned for 61 years, the longest of any Chinese emperor. He crushed the Revolt of the Three Feudatories led by Wu Sangui, with the war ending at Kunming in 1681, and took Taiwan from the Zheng family in 1683. The Treaty of Nerchinsk with Russia in 1689 left the Amur valley and Manchuria with the Qing, and he personally led an army across the Gobi in 1696 against the Dzungar leader Galdan. Qing armies drove the Dzungars from Lhasa in 1720. His court compiled the Kangxi Dictionary and the Complete Tang Poems, and he welcomed Jesuit scholars.

How they came to power: The third son of the Shunzhi Emperor, he was raised to the throne when his father died of smallpox in 1661, passed over five brothers with lower-born mothers. Four Manchu regents governed until, in 1669, he had the most powerful of them, Oboi, arrested.

How it ended: He died in Beijing on 20 December 1722 after a long dispute over the succession, and his son became the Yongzheng Emperor.

• The Sacred Edict, issued under him and revised into Sixteen Maxims by his son, urged filial piety, farming, thrift and peace among neighbours, and was recited at village lectures.
• A Jesuit account gathered by du Halde describes missionaries teaching him science, around 1680; his tolerance of Catholicism ended with the Chinese Rites controversy.
• To cut off the Zheng regime on Taiwan, the Qing from 1661 forced people on the coast to move inland, a policy Britannica says had little effect.

Sources: Asia for Educators (Columbia University): The Qing Dynasty Sacred Edict; Fordham Modern History Sourcebook: Père du Halde, Teaching Science to the Manchu Emperor, c. 1680; Britannica: Kangxi; Wikipedia: Kangxi Emperor

Cao Xueqin and Dream of the Red Chamber (c. 1715 to c. 1763 (Wikipedia gives 1710 to 1765))

Cao Xueqin, born Cao Zhan, Novelist · Qing dynasty, Nanjing and Beijing

Cao Xueqin wrote the first eighty chapters of Dream of the Red Chamber (also called The Story of the Stone, or Hongloumeng), which circulated in manuscript. It follows the decline of the wealthy Jia family, much as Cao's own family declined, with close to 40 main characters and about 400 minor ones. EBSCO's account stresses its detail on 18th-century customs, money and daily life, and its psychological realism. In 1791 Gao E and Cheng Weiyuan published a complete 120-chapter version (EBSCO says 1792), nearly three decades after Cao's death.

How they rose: His family were Han bannermen who served the imperial household; his great-grandfather was made Commissioner of Imperial Textiles at Jiangning (Nanjing), and his grandfather Cao Yin was a confidant of the Kangxi Emperor, who stayed with him four times on his southern tours.

How they died: The Yongzheng Emperor confiscated the family's assets in 1728. Cao lived in hardship and died in poverty, without seeing the novel in print; the exact dates are uncertain.

• The last 40 chapters are probably not Cao's: the Northern Virginia Community College guide says Gao E probably added them, and the question remains debated.
• Cao Yin's mother, Lady Sun, had been the wet nurse of the Kangxi Emperor, according to Wikipedia, which helps explain the family's closeness to the throne.
• The first complete English translation appeared only in 1973 to 1980, though partial translations date back to 1868.

Sources: EBSCO Research Starters: Cao Xueqin; Northern Virginia Community College, World Literature: Cáo Xueqín; Wikipedia: Cao Xueqin; Wikipedia: Dream of the Red Chamber

Qianlong Emperor (reigned 1735 to 1796, kept power until his death in 1799 (born 1711))

Hongli; reign title Qianlong, Qing dynasty · Beijing

Qianlong reigned officially for 60 years and led campaigns into Inner Asia, Burma, Nepal and Vietnam. The most significant, in the 1750s, conquered Xinjiang from the Dzungar Khanate. The war in Burma ended in failure, and Wikipedia says the treasury's funds went almost entirely on military expeditions. He sponsored the vast Siku Quanshu (Complete Library of the Four Treasuries), while literary inquisitions suppressed some 3,100 works, according to Wikipedia. Late in his reign he placed his trust in officials accused of corruption, above all his favourite Heshen.

How they came to power: He was the favourite grandson of the Kangxi Emperor, and his father the Yongzheng Emperor named him heir in a sealed box behind the throne tablet. He became emperor on 18 October 1735, aged 24.

How it ended: He abdicated in 1796 so that his reign would not exceed Kangxi's 61 years, kept real power, and died in Beijing on 7 February 1799. His son the Jiaqing Emperor then had Heshen arrested and ordered him to commit suicide.

• Rejecting Britain's requests in 1793, he wrote that he set no value on strange or ingenious objects.
• Wikipedia says he ordered the Dzungar genocide, and that a celebratory hymn was sung for the troops returning to Beijing.
• The Siku Quanshu ran to 36,381 volumes containing 3,593 titles, according to Wikipedia.

Sources: Fordham Modern History Sourcebook: Emperor Qian Long, Letter to George III, 1793; Britannica: Qing dynasty; Wikipedia: Qianlong Emperor; Wikipedia: Siku Quanshu; Wikipedia: Heshen

The Canton system (1757 to 1842)

From 1757 the Qing confined Western trade to Guangzhou (Canton), the outlet for exports such as tea, silk and porcelain. Foreigners dealt only with licensed Chinese firms, known to Westerners as the cohong and made an official monopoly in 1760, and a local merchant stood as guarantor for every foreign ship. Merchants operated from the Thirteen Factories on the Pearl River, under the customs official nicknamed the Hoppo. Britain's East India Company was already sending ships there, as it did in 1741. The Treaty of Nanjing in 1842 ended the system by opening four more ports.

• The National Army Museum notes the trade's imbalance: China would sell its goods to Britain only for silver, which steadily drained Britain's reserves, and that is the background to the opium trade.
• Wikipedia reports that by 1866 only 18 foreign firms still had offices at Canton, since trade had shifted to Hong Kong and the northern ports.
• Wikipedia also lists Massachusetts General Hospital and the Bunker Hill Monument among American institutions partly funded by opium-smuggling fortunes made in the China trade.

Sources: National Army Museum: First China War; Wikipedia: Canton System; MIT Visualizing Cultures: Rise and Fall of the Canton Trade System

Lin Zexu (Lin Tse-hsü) (1785 to 1850; commissioner at Guangzhou 1838 to 1840)

Lin Zexu, nicknamed 'Lin the Clear Sky', Imperial commissioner · Qing dynasty, Guangzhou

Lin Zexu was a respected official when the Daoguang Emperor, alarmed by opium and the silver leaving to pay for it, made him imperial commissioner in late 1838, after 19 personal audiences. At Guangzhou he forced foreign merchants to surrender their stocks and demanded they guarantee they would stop importing the drug; more than 20,000 chests were destroyed in June 1839. His diary survives and describes composing an ode of apology to the god of the sea for polluting his ocean with the opium. When British forces attacked in response, the emperor who had approved his policy dismissed him.

How they rose: The son of a poor teacher in Fujian, he passed the highest examination, the jinshi, in 1811, joined the Hanlin Academy, and rose from 1820 through the salt monopoly, water control, tax and the courts. He won the emperor's notice with a memorial opposing legalisation of opium, citing his suppression of the drug as governor general.

How they died: Exiled to the northwest frontier, he was soon recalled to high office, and he died on 22 November 1850 at Chaozhou (Wikipedia says Puning County), on his way to help suppress the Taiping Rebellion.

• His letter to Queen Victoria asks, in the 1840 Chinese Repository translation: 'we should like to ask what has become of that conscience which heaven has implanted in the breasts of all men?'
• The same letter notes that opium is banned in Britain itself, and asks how its ruler would react if foreigners brought the drug there.
• Britannica places him among reform scholars who sought in antiquity the justification for present change, a line of thought tied to the later Self-Strengthening Movement.

Sources: Fordham Modern History Sourcebook: Commissioner Lin, Letter to Queen Victoria, 1839 (from the Chinese Repository, 1840); Britannica: Lin Zexu; Wikipedia: Lin Zexu; Wikipedia: First Opium War

The Macartney embassy (sailed 1792; audience at Rehe 1793)

Viscount Macartney led Britain's first diplomatic mission to China. He asked for new ports for British trade, a permanent embassy in Beijing, a small island on the coast and looser rules at Guangzhou. The delegation carried clocks, telescopes, weapons and textiles as gifts meant to show off British technology. The emperor received him at the Chengde Mountain Resort in Rehe, rather than in the capital, and rejected everything. A dispute arose over the kowtow, in which a visitor kneels on both knees and touches the forehead to the ground, a ritual that Portuguese and Dutch merchants at Canton had accepted; Macartney offered to kneel on one knee, as he would before his own king.

• The emperor's letter to George III says that China already possesses all things.
• Wikipedia's account of the First Opium War lists it among the failed foreign embassies of the years before the war.
• Though it failed in its aims, the mission brought back extensive observations of China that participants recorded and published in Europe.

Sources: Fordham Modern History Sourcebook: Emperor Qian Long, Letter to George III, 1793; Wikipedia: Macartney Embassy; Wikipedia: First Opium War

The First Opium War (1839 to 1842; Treaty of Nanjing 29 August 1842)

British and other foreign traders had been shipping Indian opium into China illegally, and by 1838 British sales reached roughly 1,400 long tons a year. In spring 1839 the Chinese government confiscated more than 20,000 chests at Canton, destroying them in June, about 1,400 tons. Fighting began late that year; a British expeditionary force arrived in June 1840, captured Canton in May 1841 and then withdrew, and by August 1842 threatened Nanjing, at which the Qing sued for peace. The Treaty of Nanjing required a large indemnity, gave up Hong Kong Island and opened five treaty ports, including Shanghai.

• By 1839, the National Army Museum notes, opium sales to China paid for the entire British tea trade.
• In July 1839 drunken British sailors killed a Chinese villager, and Britain refused to hand the accused to Chinese courts, adding to the tension before war.
• A supplementary treaty in 1843 gave British subjects extraterritoriality and most-favoured-nation status. The United States followed with its own Treaty of Wangxia in 1844.

Sources: Office of the Historian, US State Department: The Opening to China Part I; National Army Museum: First China War; Wikipedia: Treaty of Nanking; Wikipedia: First Opium War

Hong Xiuquan and the Taiping Rebellion (rebellion 1850 to 1864 (born 1814))

Hong Xiuquan (Hung Hsiu-ch'üan), born Hong Huoxiu; Tianwang, the Heavenly King, Rebel king · Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, Nanjing

Hong Xiuquan believed himself the son of God and younger brother of Jesus, sent to reform China. His God Worshippers rose in Guangxi in 1850, and in January 1851 (sources give the 1st or the 11th) he proclaimed the Taiping Tianguo, the Heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace. Promising to share property in common, his army grew to over a million and took Nanjing in March 1853 (sources give the 10th or the 19th), renaming it Tianjing. Infighting killed the minister Yang Xiuqing and thousands of his followers, and the Qing official Zeng Guofan and the Western-led Ever-Victorious Army slowly turned the war until Nanjing fell in July 1864. Death tolls are contested: Britannica gives an estimated 20 million, while Wikipedia reports estimates from 20 to 30 million up to 73 to 100 million.

How they rose: Born to a poor Hakka family in Guangdong, he failed the civil service examination four times from 1827 to 1843. After the third failure in 1837 he fell into a delirium and saw an old man who gave him a sword against demons; in 1843 a Christian pamphlet by Liang Fa, Good Words for Exhorting the Age, convinced him of what the vision meant.

How they died: He died at Nanjing on 1 June 1864, weeks before it fell on 19 July. Britannica says that he committed suicide in despair after a long illness, the Draft History of Qing says he took poison, and Wikipedia says he likely died of his illness, though suicide by poison has been suggested.

• The Taipings banned foot-binding, prostitution and slavery, and organised separate men's and women's divisions.
• He studied for a time in Guangzhou with the American Baptist missionary Issachar Roberts, according to Wikipedia, and Taiping Christianity stressed the wrathful God of the Old Testament.
• The Draft History of Qing, written from the Qing side, says he claimed to have died of illness for seven days and revived knowing the future, and that God had warned of a great catastrophe that only worshippers would escape.

Sources: Draft History of Qing (Qing shi gao), chapter 475, Chinese text on Wikisource; Britannica: Hong Xiuquan; Britannica: Taiping Rebellion; Wikipedia: Hong Xiuquan; Wikipedia: Taiping Rebellion

The Second Opium War and the burning of the Summer Palace (1856 to 1860; Yuanming Garden burned October 1860)

With the Qing fighting the Taipings, Britain used the boarding of the British-registered ship Arrow at Canton in October 1856 to renew war, and France joined, citing the murder of a missionary. The allies took Canton and reached Tianjin, forcing the treaties of June 1858, which opened new ports, allowed foreign envoys to live in Beijing and gave missionaries freedom of movement; the war also brought the legalisation of the opium trade. When the Qing blocked ratification at the Dagu forts in 1859, a larger force returned in 1860 and captured Beijing in October. The Beijing Convention confirmed the treaties and gave Britain the southern Kowloon Peninsula.

• Lord Elgin ordered the destruction of the Old Summer Palace on 18 October 1860, in retaliation for the imprisonment of a delegation, 19 of whom were sentenced to death, according to Wikipedia.
• Looted art from the palace, including porcelain, jade and silk robes, is said by UNESCO, as cited on Wikipedia, to be in 47 museums around the world.
• The defenders at Dagu drove the British-led force back with heavy casualties in 1859, but a considerably larger force returned the next year.

Sources: Wikipedia: Second Opium War; Wikipedia: Old Summer Palace; Office of the Historian, US State Department: The Opening to China Part II

The Self-Strengthening Movement (1861 to 1895)

After the Opium Wars and the Taiping war, the governors-general Zeng Guofan, Li Hongzhang and Zuo Zongtang set out to strengthen Qing power by adopting Western technology, with support from Prince Gong in Beijing. The Tongwen Guan, a school founded in 1862, taught foreign languages and added astronomy and mathematics in 1867; arsenals such as the Jiangnan Arsenal at Shanghai made modern weapons. Its advocates at first saw no need for change to institutions or ideas, although after 1885 some lower officials and intellectuals began calling for a parliament. Britannica judges the overall success as limited, because of administration, finance and clashes between tradition and Western methods.

• The scholar Feng Guifen (1809 to 1874), its leading theorist, urged China to use the barbarians' superior techniques to control the barbarians, in Britannica's rendering.
• Its naval training schemes underpinned the Beiyang Fleet, by Wikipedia's account the largest in Asia at the time, which Japan then beat at the Yalu River in 1894.
• Western officers' training methods, seen in the joint fight against the Taipings, helped to prompt the movement in the first place.

Sources: Asia for Educators (Columbia University): Feng Guifen, On the Adoption of Western Learning; Britannica: Self-Strengthening Movement; Wikipedia: Self-Strengthening Movement

Empress Dowager Cixi (Tz'u-hsi) (dominant at court 1861 to 1908 (born 1835))

Empress Dowager Cixi, posthumous title Empress Xiaoqinxian, Regent · Qing dynasty, Beijing

Cixi dominated Qing government for almost half a century as regent or as the power behind the throne. Under her first regency the Taiping and Nian rebellions were put down, and schools for foreign languages, a modern customs service, arsenals and a foreign office appeared. After her son died in 1875 she adopted her three-year-old nephew as the Guangxu Emperor, and she became sole regent when her co-regent Ci'an died suddenly in 1881. She nominally handed over power in 1889 and retired to the summer palace, but in 1898 she reversed Guangxu's reforms in a coup and resumed the regency, and in 1900 she backed the Boxers. After fleeing Beijing and returning in 1902 she began to carry out many of the reforms she had stopped.

How they came to power: She entered the harem of the Xianfeng Emperor as a low-ranking concubine and in 1856 bore his only son. On Xianfeng's death in 1861 she, Ci'an and Prince Gong staged a coup against the council of eight regents.

How it ended: She died in Beijing on 15 November 1908, the day after the death of the Guangxu Emperor was announced, and was buried in the Eastern Qing tombs.

• A report by Chinese researchers and police in 2008 confirmed that Guangxu had been poisoned with arsenic. It did not say who ordered it, and Britannica notes there has never been hard evidence, though suspicion long pointed at Cixi.
• Much of her hostile reputation in English comes from Bland and Backhouse's China Under the Empress Dowager (1910), built on palace gossip; Backhouse was later found to have forged much of its source material, and her legacy remains contested.
• Wikipedia notes that, unlike many Manchu women in the imperial household, she could read and write Chinese, which helped her as a young consort.

Sources: Britannica: Cixi; Britannica: Hundred Days of Reform; Office of the Historian, US State Department: Secretary of State John Hay and the Open Door in China; Wikipedia: Empress Dowager Cixi

Qiu Jin (Ch'iu Chin) (1875 (some sources 1877 to 1879) to 15 July 1907)

Qiu Jin, also Qiu Xuanqing, Revolutionary and poet · Qing dynasty, Shaoxing

Qiu Jin was a poet, feminist and revolutionary who argued against foot-binding and arranged marriage and for women's education. In 1906 she founded the Chinese Women's Journal in Shanghai, where she published a manifesto addressed to China's 200 million women. With her cousin Xu Xilin she worked to unite secret societies against the Qing. In February 1907 she took over the Datong School in Shaoxing, which he had founded as a front for revolutionary activity, and there she organised a Restoration Army uprising in Zhejiang.

How they rose: Born to a family of officials in Fujian, she was educated at home, which was uncommon for a girl. She married Wang Tingjun in 1896 under an arrangement by her father and had two children, then left them in 1904 to study in Tokyo, where she joined revolutionary groups.

How they died: The uprising failed. Captured at the Datong School and interrogated, she refused to confess and was beheaded in Shaoxing before dawn on 15 July 1907. Friends buried her near West Lake in Hangzhou.

• Wikipedia says that foot-binding usually began between the ages of four and nine, with the aim of a 'golden lotus' foot of about 3 Chinese inches (10 cm). Qiu Jin had suffered it herself, and she wrote about it in her manifesto, according to Wikipedia.
• Her Gale biography notes that both the Communist government in China and the Nationalist government in Taiwan later honoured her.
• Sources disagree on her birthplace: Gale gives Xiamen and Wikipedia gives Fuzhou, both in Fujian.

Sources: Encyclopedia.com (Gale, Women in World History): Qiu Jin (c. 1875-1907); Wikipedia: Qiu Jin; Wikipedia: Foot binding

The First Sino-Japanese War (war declared 1 August 1894; Treaty of Shimonoseki 1895)

The war grew out of a struggle over Korea, China's most important client state. After the Tonghak rebellion of 1894 brought Chinese troops at the Korean king's request, Japan sent 8,000 of its own and sank the British steamer Kowshing carrying Chinese reinforcements. Japan beat the Beiyang Fleet at the Yalu River, invaded Manchuria, took Port Arthur in November 1894 and Weihaiwei in February 1895. The Treaty of Shimonoseki recognised Korea's independence, ceded Taiwan, the Pescadores and the Liaodong Peninsula, and imposed an indemnity of 200 million taels.

• Russia, France and Germany together forced Japan to return the Liaodong Peninsula to China soon after the treaty.
• The Korean leader Kim Ok-kyun was lured to Shanghai and assassinated in 1894, probably by agents of Yuan Shikai, and his body was sent back on a Chinese warship and displayed.
• Defeat triggered a reform movement in China and, Britannica says, the beginnings of revolutionary activity against the Qing.

Sources: Treaty of Shimonoseki (1895), English text on Wikisource; Britannica: First Sino-Japanese War; Wikipedia: First Sino-Japanese War; Wikipedia: Treaty of Shimonoseki

The Hundred Days' Reform (11 June to 21 September 1898)

After the defeat by Japan, Kang Youwei, an examination candidate, led others in a petition against the peace treaty and for sweeping reform. On 11 June 1898 the Guangxu Emperor issued his first reform decree, and he met Kang on 16 June. More than 40 edicts followed, on replacing the classical examination, founding national schools, modernising the army and law, and promoting Western industry and science. Threatened officials rallied to Cixi, who on 21 September staged a coup with the army's support and confined the emperor. Kang and his disciple Liang Qichao escaped to Japan, and six other reformers were executed.

• A list in the Fordham sourcebook includes farm schools in every province, patent and copyright laws, naval academies, and encouragement for journalists to write on all political subjects.
• Most of the edicts were never enacted and were repealed, though modern schools were retained, and Zhang Zhidong and others later carried out piecemeal reform.
• Zhang Zhidong's Exhortation to Learning, distributed in 1898, argued for Western-style industry without abandoning China's cultural heritage, a more cautious programme than Kang's.

Sources: Fordham East Asian History Sourcebook: Emperor Kuang Hsu, Attempted Reforms, 1898; Britannica (rev. Zhihou Xia): Hundred Days of Reform; Wikipedia: Hundred Days' Reform

The Boxer Rebellion (late 1899 to September 1901; legations besieged 20 June to 14 August 1900)

The Yihequan, 'Righteous and Harmonious Fists', practised rituals they believed made them invulnerable, and they grew in North China amid poverty, natural disasters and foreign pressure. By late 1899 they were attacking Chinese Christians and Western missionaries. In June 1900 the foreign powers stormed the Dagu forts, and on 21 June Cixi's court issued a decree that Wikipedia calls a de facto declaration of war; the German minister was killed, and the legations were besieged. An eight-nation force of about 20,000 reached Beijing on 14 August, and the court fled to Xi'an. The protocol of September 1901 imposed an indemnity of 450 million taels of silver, more than the annual tax revenue, to be paid over 39 years.

• Casualties are uncertain: Wikipedia's summary gives about 100,000 deaths in all, among them 32,000 Chinese Christians and 200 Western missionaries in northern China.
• Viceroys in the Yangtze valley and the south ignored the court's orders and suppressed unrest, which helped keep the war confined to the north. A Chinese Christian, Fei Ch'i-hao, left an eyewitness account, published by Luella Miner in 1907.
• The US State Department's history says the uprising, backed by Cixi, threatened the Open Door policy set out in John Hay's notes of 1899 to 1900.

Sources: Fordham Modern History Sourcebook: Fei Ch'i-hao, The Boxer Rebellion (from Luella Miner, Two Heroes of Cathay, 1907); Office of the Historian, US State Department: Secretary of State John Hay and the Open Door in China; Wikipedia: Boxer Rebellion

The 1911 Revolution and the last emperor (Wuchang uprising 10 October 1911; abdication 12 February 1912)

A dispute over a railway loan set off revolt in Sichuan in September 1911, and on 10 October a mutiny broke out among troops in Wuchang after a plot was uncovered in Hankou. City after city declared against the Qing, and the regent called the former viceroy Yuan Shikai out of retirement. By the end of the year 14 provinces had broken away, a republican government had formed at Nanjing, and Sun Yat-sen, back from abroad, was elected provisional president. Puyi abdicated on 12 February 1912, with the title of emperor kept for life and a large pension. Sun then resigned in Yuan's favour, and the government moved to Beijing in April.

• The abdication decree, issued in the dowager's voice, presents a republican form of government as the Will of Heaven.
• Sun Yat-sen had been head of the revolutionary United League (Tongmenghui), founded in Tokyo in 1905, and Britannica says he is known as the father of modern China.
• Puyi (1906 to 1967) succeeded at age three in 1908, stayed for a time in the palace, was expelled from the palace in 1924, left Beijing in February 1925, and later served as Japan's puppet emperor of Manchukuo from 1934 to 1945.

Sources: Fordham Modern History Sourcebook: Proclamation of the Abdication of the Manchus, 1912; Britannica: Chinese Revolution (1911-12); Britannica: Puyi; Britannica: Sun Yat-sen; Wikipedia: 1911 Revolution

Sun Yat-sen and the first Republic (born 1866; provisional president 1 January to 10 March 1912; died 12 March 1925)

Sun Yat-sen (pinyin Sun Yixian, also known as Sun Zhongshan), Provisional president, Republic of China · Nanjing

Revolutionary groups took Wuchang in the autumn of 1911, provinces declared for them, and delegates elected Sun Yat-sen provisional president of the Republic of China, an office he held from 1 January 1912. He promised the presidency to Yuan Shikai, who commanded the strongest army in the country, if Yuan accepted a republic. The last Qing emperor abdicated on 12 February 1912, and Yuan became provisional president in Beijing on 10 March. After the 1913 killing of the Nationalist leader Song Jiaoren, widely attributed to Yuan, Sun led a revolt against him that failed and left again for exile. Britannica describes Sun as de facto ruler from 1923 to 1925, though his base was in Guangdong and much of the country was held by rival military commanders after Yuan's death in 1916.

How they rose: Sun was born to farmers in Xiangshan, Guangdong, schooled in Honolulu and Hong Kong, and graduated in medicine in 1892. A failed uprising plot in Guangzhou (Canton) in 1895 began a 16-year exile, and in 1905 he became head of the United League (Tongmenghui) in Tokyo.

How they died: He died in Beijing on 12 March 1925. His death was long attributed to liver cancer, but an original autopsy report examined in 2016 gives an adenocarcinoma of the gallbladder.

• In 1896 the Chinese legation in London held Sun for 13 days by Britannica's count (12 by Wikipedia's) and planned to ship him home; a British employee passed word to his former teacher James Cantlie, and the Foreign Office secured his release.
• Both governments honour him: the Republic of China on Taiwan calls him 'Father of the Nation', and the People's Republic calls him 'Forerunner of the Revolution'.
• Yuan Shikai dissolved parliament in January 1914, announced a new dynasty with himself as emperor in December 1915, abolished it in March 1916 under opposition from many sides, and died that June. He is sometimes called the 'father of the warlords' because of the fragmented military rule that followed.

Sources: Office of the Historian, US State Department: The Chinese Revolution of 1911; Britannica: Sun Yat-sen; Britannica: Yuan Shikai; Wikipedia: Sun Yat-sen

The May Fourth Movement (New Culture Movement from 1915; demonstration on 4 May 1919; Communist Party founded July 1921)

On 4 May 1919 more than 3,000 students from 13 Beijing colleges protested the Paris Peace Conference's decision to transfer the former German concessions in Shandong to Japan. They burned the house of the minister of communications and assaulted China's minister to Japan. Demonstrations spread, more than 1,000 students were arrested, and from 5 June merchants and workers in Shanghai and other cities struck for a week. Three officials were dismissed, the cabinet resigned, and China refused to sign the peace treaty with Germany. The name also covers the wider movement begun by Chen Duxiu's magazine New Youth in 1915, which attacked Confucian ethics and promoted science, democracy and writing in the vernacular.

• Lu Xun (born Zhou Shuren) published 'Diary of a Madman' in 1918, the first Western-style story written wholly in vernacular Chinese; its narrator sees traditional society as one that eats people.
• The Chinese Communist Party was founded in July 1921 by Li Dazhao, Chen Duxiu and others who came out of the movement. By 1923 it had about 300 members.
• The young Mao Zedong worked for about half a year as a librarian's assistant at Peking University in the months before the protests, where he came under the influence of Li Dazhao and Chen Duxiu.

Sources: Britannica: May Fourth Movement; Britannica: Lu Xun; Britannica: Chinese Communist Party; Britannica: Mao Zedong; Wikipedia: May Fourth Movement

Chiang Kai-shek (head of the Nationalist government 1928 to 1949; led the government on Taiwan 1949 to 1975 (born 1887))

Chiang Kai-shek (pinyin Jiang Jieshi), Nationalist government · Nanjing, Chongqing, then Taipei

Chiang launched a campaign against the northern warlords in 1926, set up a Nationalist (Guomindang, Kuomintang) government at Nanjing (Nanking) in April 1927, and in June 1928 his forces entered Beijing. In 1927 he had broken with the Communists, expelling them from the party and suppressing the unions they organised, and between 1930 and 1934 he ran five encirclement campaigns against their bases. In December 1936 his own generals seized him at Xi'an and held him for about two weeks, until he agreed to an alliance against Japan. He led China through the war of 1937 to 1945 and resumed the civil war in 1946, and by 1949 he had lost the mainland and moved to Taiwan. Britannica lists corruption in his government and his wartime strategy among the reasons given for his defeat, and describes his later rule on Taiwan as a dictatorship that put economic growth before democracy.

How they came to power: Born to a merchant and farming family in Zhejiang, he trained at Baoding and in Japan and served in the Japanese army from 1909 to 1911. He joined Sun Yat-sen in 1918, studied Soviet institutions in 1923, and became commandant of the Whampoa Military Academy near Guangzhou.

How it ended: He died in Taipei on 5 April 1975, aged 87, of kidney failure aggravated by heart failure. His son Chiang Ching-kuo later became president.

• In 1916 and 1917 he lived in Shanghai and, according to Britannica, apparently belonged to the Green Gang, a secret society.
• He married Soong Mei-ling in 1927 and became a Christian in October 1930.
• After 1 January 1942 he served as supreme commander of Allied forces in the China theatre.

Sources: Britannica: Chiang Kai-shek; Britannica: Second Sino-Japanese War; Office of the Historian, US State Department: The Chinese Revolution of 1949; Wikipedia: Chiang Kai-shek

The Long March (October 1934 to October 1935)

Chiang Kai-shek's fifth encirclement campaign used about 700,000 troops and lines of blockhouses against the Communist base on the Jiangxi-Fujian border. In October 1934 the remaining 86,000 troops, including administrative personnel and about 30 women, broke through and moved west, losing more than half their strength in the first three months. A party conference at Zunyi in Guizhou in January 1935 denounced the leadership that had directed the campaign and raised Mao Zedong's standing. After a dispute with the commander Zhang Guotao in Sichuan, the main body under Mao reached northern Shaanxi in October 1935 with about 8,000 survivors. The usual figures for the route are about 10,000 km (6,000 miles), 18 mountain ranges and 24 rivers.

• Sources differ on Zunyi: Britannica says Mao established his dominance of the party there, while Wikipedia's chronology has Zhou Enlai as the most powerful figure afterward, with Mao as his assistant.
• He Zizhen, then Mao's wife, made the march while pregnant, and Deng Xiaoping also took part.
• With later arrivals the Communist force reached about 30,000 by late 1936, and in December 1936 it moved to Yan'an (Yenan), its base through the war with Japan.

Sources: Britannica: Long March; Britannica: Mao Zedong; Britannica: Deng Xiaoping; Wikipedia: Long March

The war with Japan and Nanjing (7 July 1937 to 9 September 1945; Japan seized Manchuria from 1931)

Japan seized Mukden (Shenyang) in September 1931 and set up the state of Manchukuo in 1932 under the former Qing emperor Puyi. Fighting at the Marco Polo Bridge near Beijing on 7 July 1937 became a full war, and within two years Japan held most ports, the main cities as far west as Hankou and most railways. The government moved to Chongqing (Chungking), while Communist forces organised local governments and armies behind Japanese lines. Japanese troops took Nanjing on 13 December 1937 and carried out mass killing and rape over the following weeks; the Nanjing War Crimes Tribunal recorded more than 300,000 dead, the figure China's government maintains; the Tokyo tribunal's judgment said over 200,000, citing 155,000 burials in support, and its verdict on General Matsui used 'upwards of 100,000'; the Japanese historian Ikuhiko Hata counted about 30,000 prisoners and 8,000 to 12,000 civilians, and put the total at 38,000 to 42,000; and Britannica says most estimates run from 100,000 to more than 300,000. Britannica says millions died in combat and many millions more of starvation or disease over the eight years.

• Estimates for Nanjing differ partly because authors draw different boundaries of area and time, and disagree on whether executed prisoners of war count.
• About 250,000 people sheltered in a Safety Zone of about 3.9 square km run by Western residents, including more than 10,000 women and children at Ginling College under Minnie Vautrin.
• Matsui Iwane was convicted by the Tokyo tribunal and Tani Hisao by a Chinese court in Nanjing; both were sentenced to death and executed.

Sources: Britannica: Second Sino-Japanese War; Britannica: Nanjing Massacre; Britannica: Chinese Civil War; Office of the Historian, US State Department: Japan, China, the United States and the Road to Pearl Harbor; Wikipedia: Death toll of the Nanjing Massacre

The civil war and 1949 (1945 to 1949; People's Republic proclaimed 1 October 1949)

After Japan's surrender, Nationalist troops carried by US transport took key cities and railways in the east and north, while Communist forces held much of the northern countryside and Manchuria. Mao Zedong flew to Chongqing on 28 August 1945, and on 10 October the two sides announced agreement in principle to work for a united and democratic China. The US envoy George Marshall arranged an armistice on 10 January 1946, but fighting resumed in Manchuria, and the National Assembly adopted a constitution on 25 December 1946 without the Communists. Mao proclaimed the People's Republic of China on 1 October 1949, and Chiang Kai-shek's government moved to Taiwan. Official Communist figures counted about 1.5 million dead and wounded in the People's Liberation Army alone.

• In a speech of 21 September 1949 to the Political Consultative Conference, attended by more than 600 delegates, Mao announced that the Chinese people had stood up.
• The Truman administration published the 'China White Paper' in August 1949 to explain past US policy; for more than twenty years after 1949 there were few contacts, limited trade and no diplomatic ties between the two countries.
• Marshall's February 1946 plan set a combined army of 108 divisions, 90 government and 18 Communist, under one defence ministry; it was never carried out.

Sources: Office of the Historian, US State Department: The Chinese Revolution of 1949; Mao Zedong, The Chinese People Have Stood Up (21 September 1949), Selected Works vol. 5; Britannica: Chinese Civil War; Wikipedia: Chinese Civil War

Mao Zedong (party leader from 1935 by Britannica's dating, with the title of chairman from 1943; chairman of the People's Republic 1949 to 1959; party chairman until his death on 9 September 1976 (born 26 December 1893))

Mao Zedong (Mao Tse-tung), Chairman Mao, Chinese Communist Party · Beijing

Mao led the Communist Party from the Long March, a leadership Britannica dates to 1935, and headed the People's Republic from its founding in 1949. His government carried out land redistribution, sent troops into the Korean War and ran the first five-year plan of 1953 to 1957, and the Hundred Flowers opening was followed by the Anti-Rightist Campaign of 1957. He launched the Great Leap Forward in 1958 and stepped down as head of state on 27 April 1959, handing that office to Liu Shaoqi while keeping the party chairmanship. In 1966 he launched the Cultural Revolution, which ran until his death. Assessments differ: according to Britannica, Beijing's official position treats his actions as laudable until the summer of 1957 and harder to defend after that, and Britannica's own summary credits him with Chinese sovereignty and land for the landless while holding him responsible for repression and famine.

How they came to power: Born in Shaoshan, Hunan, the son of a farmer and grain dealer, he graduated from a normal school in Changsha in 1918 and committed to Marxism by January 1921. He organised peasants in the countryside after the party was driven from the cities in 1927, and gained the party's leadership during the Long March.

How it ended: He died in Beijing on 9 September 1976, aged 82, after years of lung and heart illness that were kept a state secret. His body lies in the Chairman Mao Memorial Hall in Beijing.

• As a teenager he refused an arranged marriage made for him and left home to study. He later married Yang Kaihui, He Zizhen and, in 1939, the film actress Jiang Qing.
• His doctrine departed from other Marxism in treating peasants, not only urban workers, as a revolutionary force.
• A party plenum on 27 to 29 June 1981 adopted a resolution assessing his record, five years after his death, and China's agriculture was later decollectivised.

Sources: Britannica: Mao Zedong; Communique of the Sixth Plenary Session of the Eleventh Central Committee (June 1981); Office of the Historian, US State Department: The Chinese Revolution of 1949; Wikipedia: Mao Zedong

Taiwan after 1949 (government relocated 1949; martial law 1949 to 1987; direct presidential elections from 1996)

Japan had ruled Taiwan from 1895 until 1945, when the Republic of China took control, and troops sent from the mainland suppressed an uprising that followed the February 28 Incident of 1947. In 1949 the government relocated to Taiwan with about 1.2 million people by the Taiwan government's count (Britannica gives 1.5 million), and martial law lasted until 1987. Rapid economic growth began in the mid-1960s, and the first export processing zone opened at Kaohsiung in 1966. Lee Teng-hui, the first Taiwan-born president, won the first direct presidential election in 1996, and in 2000 Chen Shui-bian's election ended more than 50 years of Nationalist rule. Beijing maintains that it has jurisdiction over Taiwan under its one-China policy, Taipei's government states that the People's Republic has never exercised sovereignty over the island, and Britannica notes there is no agreement on how or when, if ever, the two will unify.

• The People's Republic shelled the outlying islands in 1954 to 1955 and 1958. The US signed a defence treaty with Taipei in 1954, and on 25 October 1971 UN General Assembly Resolution 2758 gave China's seat to Beijing; the Republic of China withdrew, and Wikipedia's account has it walking out shortly before the vote.
• Taiwan's government dates the period it calls the White Terror to 1949 to 1991; in 2018 a Transitional Justice Commission was set up and President Tsai Ing-wen apologised to victims of political persecution whose records were expunged.
• Ma Ying-jeou met Xi Jinping in Singapore in November 2015, the first meeting of the two sides' top leaders in 66 years. In 2019 Taiwan legalised same-sex marriage, and in 2024 Lai Ching-te won a third straight presidential term for the Democratic Progressive Party.

Sources: Government of the Republic of China (Taiwan): History; Office of the Historian, US State Department: The Taiwan Straits Crises, 1954-55 and 1958; Britannica: Taiwan; Britannica: Lee Teng-hui; Wikipedia: Taiwan under Republic of China rule

Zhou Enlai (premier 1949 to 1976, foreign minister 1949 to 1958 (born 5 March 1898, died 8 January 1976))

Zhou Enlai (Chou En-lai), Premier of the People's Republic · Beijing

Zhou headed the state bureaucracy from October 1949 until his death and led foreign policy even after giving up the foreign ministry in 1958. He signed a 30-year treaty with the Soviet Union in Moscow on 14 February 1950 and offered support to nonaligned Asian states at the Bandung Conference in 1955. During the Cultural Revolution he stayed in post; Britannica credits him with restraining its radical leaders and keeping government running, while Wikipedia's account notes that he remained deferential to Mao. He arranged Henry Kissinger's 1971 visit to Beijing and the visit of President Richard Nixon, who came to China on 21 to 28 February 1972. The Shanghai Communique issued at the end set out both governments' positions on Taiwan, and formal diplomatic relations followed in 1979.

How they rose: From a gentry family in Huai'an, he studied in Tianjin and Japan, was arrested for student agitation in 1920, and became a Communist organiser in France. Back in China from 1924, he served at Whampoa, took part in the 1927 Nanchang Uprising and was the party's chief negotiator with the Nationalists from the mid-1930s.

How they died: He died in Beijing on 8 January 1976, aged 77, having been diagnosed with bladder cancer in 1972 according to a biography by Gao Wenqian. By his wishes his ashes were scattered and he has no mausoleum.

• In December 1936 he flew to Xi'an and persuaded the commanders who had seized Chiang Kai-shek not to kill him.
• He sponsored the return of Deng Xiaoping as deputy premier in 1973.
• A public opening came through sport: China invited the US table tennis team in April 1971, and the Chinese team visited the United States in April 1972.

Sources: Office of the Historian, US State Department: Rapprochement with China, 1972; Foreign Relations of the United States 1969-1976, vol. XVII, document 203: Joint Statement (Shanghai Communique), 27 February 1972; Britannica: Zhou Enlai; Wikipedia: Zhou Enlai

The Marriage Law and land reform (Marriage Law promulgated 1 May 1950; national campaign to the end of 1953; land reform from the late 1940s into the early 1950s)

The New Marriage Law of 1 May 1950, drafted with Deng Yingchao among its key authors, based marriage on free choice, monogamy and equal rights for both sexes, and required couples to register. Freedom of choice, freedom of divorce and bans on concubines and child marriage had earlier Republican precedents; registration with state bodies was new. Land reform redistributed about 43 percent of cultivated land to about 60 percent of the rural population and took land from more than ten million landlords. Estimates of deaths from 1949 to 1953 range from 200,000 to 5 million in Wikipedia's survey, most of them combining land reform with the counter-revolutionary campaign; for land reform alone, the historian Benedict Stavis estimated 200,000 to 800,000 and J. A. G. Roberts reported a range of 200,000 to 2 million. A parallel campaign against counter-revolutionaries reported 712,000 executions in a 1954 report by Deputy Public Security Minister Xu Zirong, which the historian Yang Kuisong argued was too low.

• A central government inspection in 1951 found that, by rough estimates reported in the central-south region, more than 10,000 women had died by suicide or been killed that year in marital disputes.
• March 1953 was declared a national month for promoting the law, with lectures, exhibitions, comic books and plays such as the Peking opera 'Southeast Flies the Peacock'.
• By 1955 more than 90 percent of marriages had been officially registered, according to the Chinese Posters project.

Sources: Chinese Posters: New Marriage Law (1950); Sixth Tone: Inside the Early Push to Revolutionize Marriage in China; Wikipedia: Land Reform Movement

Tibet, 1950 to 1959 (incorporation began 1950; Seventeen Point Agreement 1951; uprising from 10 March 1959)

Tibet's incorporation into the People's Republic began in 1950, the year the 14th Dalai Lama assumed full political power. After the Seventeen Point Agreement of 1951 between the People's Republic and representatives of the Dalai Lama, land reform was delayed in central Tibet but not in the eastern areas of Kham and Amdo, where armed resistance grew. Protests began in Lhasa on 10 March 1959, moved from support for the Dalai Lama to demands for independence, and were suppressed by the People's Liberation Army, while the Dalai Lama went to India. Thousands died, with the number disputed: an estimate in the PRIO dataset is 10,000, and the Tibetan government in exile claims 85,000 to 87,000, a figure the Tibetologist Tom Grunfeld called difficult to verify. Britannica records the opposing descriptions: many Tibetans call the events an invasion and an occupation, and China holds that Tibet has been part of China for centuries and was liberated from a system of serfdom.

• In 1954 the Dalai Lama travelled to Beijing (Peking) for talks with Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiaoping.
• The UN General Assembly adopted resolutions on the question of Tibet in 1959, 1961 and 1965.
• The Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded the Dalai Lama the 1989 Peace Prize, citing his opposition to the use of violence. Exiled Tibetans mark 10 March as Tibetan Uprising Day.

Sources: The Nobel Prize: The 14th Dalai Lama, Biographical; The Nobel Prize: Press release, Peace Prize 1989; Britannica: Tibet; Wikipedia: 1959 Tibetan uprising

The Great Leap Forward and the famine (campaign 1958 to about 1960, formally turned in January 1961; famine c. 1959 to 1961 (some sources include 1962))

The campaign organised peasants into communes, the first of them in Henan in early 1958, with communal kitchens, production brigades and small backyard steel furnaces meant to replace machinery with labour. Mao pressed to double steel output from 5.3 million to 10.7 million tons in a single year, while farm labour moved into industry and public works. Food output fell, and the government began repealing the programme between early 1960 and the January 1961 plenum, returning private plots and tools. Estimates of famine deaths differ widely: the Chinese Academy of Sciences team at least 15 million, Britannica about 20 million, former statistics chief Li Chengrui 22 million, the demographer Ansley Coale 27 million, the demographer Judith Banister 30 million, the journalist Yang Jisheng 36 million, the historian Frank Dikötter at least 45 million, and Yu Xiguang 55 million. The figures rest on different methods, including demographic reconstruction from censuses and, for Yang and Dikötter, provincial archives and interviews.

• Official statistics give China's population in 1961 as 658.59 million, about 13.5 million fewer than the 672.07 million of 1959.
• At the Seven Thousand Cadres Conference in 1962 Liu Shaoqi attributed the famine 30 percent to natural disasters and 70 percent to human error. A 1981 party statement attributed it mainly to the Great Leap and the anti-right-deviation struggle, along with disasters and the split with the Soviet Union.
• The role of weather is disputed: Britannica cites three consecutive years of natural calamities, while Wikipedia reports Chinese Academy of Meteorological Sciences data rating the 1960 drought as mild, and Dikötter's argument that most floods came from poorly planned irrigation works. James C. Scott calls Dikötter's figure about 10 million above most experts' estimates, but not preposterous.

Sources: James C. Scott, London Review of Books: Tyranny of the Ladle (review of Dikötter and Yang); Andrew J. Nathan, Foreign Affairs: review of Dikötter, Mao's Great Famine; Britannica: Great Leap Forward; Wikipedia: Great Chinese Famine

The Cultural Revolution (central document of 16 May 1966; formally launched August 1966; ended with Mao's death in 1976 and officially closed by the Eleventh Party Congress in August 1977)

Mao launched the campaign to replace his designated successors and rectify the party, and encouraged urban youths organised as Red Guards to attack traditional values and criticise officials while schools closed. President Liu Shaoqi and General Secretary Deng Xiaoping were removed, provincial party committees were overthrown from January 1967, and armed clashes between Red Guard factions spread by that summer. In 1968 the army took over schools, factories and agencies and sent millions of urban youths to the countryside. Published death tolls range from 40,000 to 8 million, according to the sociologist Andrew Walder, who gives 1.1 to 1.6 million for 1966 to 1971 from local annals, and who reports that party investigations of 1982 and 1987, described in a 1996 Hong Kong magazine, found 1.2 million and 1.7 million. Walder estimates 22 to 30 million direct victims of political persecution, and finds that about a quarter of deaths came from Red Guards and other rebel insurgents, and most from repression by the authorities.

• Industrial production in 1968 was 12 percent below that of 1966, according to Britannica.
• A party resolution adopted on 27 June 1981 placed chief responsibility for the Cultural Revolution on Mao, and described it as an error while also affirming his revolutionary contribution.
• Scientific work also continued in places: in 1969 Tu Youyou was appointed to lead a team in the secret malaria effort known as Project 523, which identified artemisinin in the plant Artemisia annua and earned her a share of the 2015 Nobel Prize.

Sources: Andrew G. Walder, Social Science History 38 (2014): Rebellion and Repression in China, 1966-1971; Stanford Report: How violence unfolded during China's Cultural Revolution (interview with Andrew Walder); The Nobel Prize: Tu Youyou, Biographical; Britannica: Cultural Revolution; Wikipedia: Resolution on Certain Questions in the History of Our Party

Deng Xiaoping and reform and opening (China's most powerful figure from the late 1970s to 1997 (born 22 August 1904, died 19 February 1997))

Deng Xiaoping (Teng Hsiao-p'ing), Paramount leader · Beijing

Deng took power from Mao's successor Hua Guofeng between 1977 and 1981, and placed his protégés Zhao Ziyang and Hu Yaobang in the premiership and party leadership. Peasant farmers were given control of their production and profits from 1981, a change Britannica credits with raising farm output within a few years. Special economic zones, foreign investment and wider trade followed, along with the one-child policy, while the Four Cardinal Principles kept party leadership in place. He did not take the most conspicuous party or state posts and ruled through the Central Military Commission and personal authority, stepping back from the Central Committee in 1987. He backed the use of force against protesters in June 1989, and in 1992 his southern tour restarted reforms after a period of opposition from party hardliners.

How they came to power: The son of a landowner in Sichuan, he went to France in 1920 and on to the Soviet Union in 1926, and joined the Long March. He was removed from office during the Cultural Revolution, reinstated in 1973 with Zhou Enlai's sponsorship, purged again after Zhou's death in 1976, and returned by July 1977.

How it ended: He died in Beijing on 19 February 1997. By his wishes some organs were donated, and his ashes were scattered at sea, so he has no grave.

• He met President Jimmy Carter at the White House in January 1979, the year the two countries established formal relations.
• He quoted the old proverb that the colour of a cat does not matter so long as it catches mice, which became known as his 'cat theory'.
• Time named him its Person of the Year in 1978 and 1985.

Sources: Office of the Historian, US State Department: Rapprochement with China, 1972; Britannica: Deng Xiaoping; Britannica: Tiananmen Square incident; Wikipedia: Deng Xiaoping

The one-child policy (open letter of 25 September 1980; replaced by a two-child limit in 2016 and a three-child limit in 2021)

A voluntary programme of 1978 urged no more than two children, and on 25 September 1980 a public letter from the Central Committee called on party members to keep to one, the date usually given as the policy's start. Exceptions covered some ethnic minorities and families whose first child was disabled, and it was applied more strictly in cities than in the countryside. Enforcement ranged from contraceptives and financial incentives to sanctions and, at times, notably the early 1980s, forced abortions and sterilisations. The end was announced in late 2015 and it formally ended in 2016, followed by a three-child limit in 2021. The government's count of 400 million prevented births is disputed by scholars including Wang Feng and Cai Yong; Wang points to Thailand's similar fertility trajectory without such a policy.

• Preference for sons skewed the sex ratio, and Britannica reports a rise in abortions of female fetuses and in baby girls killed or placed in orphanages.
• The National Bureau of Statistics reported in January 2023 that China had 850,000 fewer people at the end of 2022 than a year earlier, with 9.56 million births against 10.41 million deaths.
• Amnesty International said the 2021 three-child limit still violated reproductive rights, and the state news agency Xinhua said it would improve the population structure.

Sources: Britannica: One-child policy; BBC News: China allows three children in major policy shift; CBC News: China's population declines for 1st time since 1960s; Wikipedia: One-child policy

The 1989 Tiananmen protests and crackdown (mid-April to 4 June 1989)

After former party leader Hu Yaobang died on 15 April 1989, students and then workers and others gathered in Tiananmen Square seeking political reform and an end to corruption, with similar protests in other cities. Zhao Ziyang favoured negotiation; Premier Li Peng, supported by Deng Xiaoping, favoured force, and martial law was declared in Beijing on 20 May. On the night of 3 to 4 June troops and tanks advanced, firing on or crushing those blocking their way, and many if not most deaths, by a US embassy cable of 22 June, occurred on Chang'an Avenue and nearby streets, not in the square. Death tolls differ: the Chinese government's count is 241 including soldiers (nearly 300 in its first statement), the Tiananmen Mothers have identified 202, records from 11 Beijing hospitals show at least 478, Amnesty International says up to 1,000, a US State Department situation report of 4 June gave 500 to 2,600, and a cable from British ambassador Alan Donald, relaying a secondhand source, said at least 10,000. The 10,000 figure is disputed. A 22 June 1989 US cable reported the defense attaché's office calling a figure of 2,600, attributed to the Chinese Red Cross in a Kyodo report, 'not an unreasonable estimate', while Nicholas Kristof reported in 1989 that the organisation denied giving it.

• The government called the protesters counterrevolutionaries and arrested thousands of suspected dissidents; a number were executed. Western media used the word 'massacre', and public commemoration is banned in China.
• A demonstration during Mikhail Gorbachev's visit in mid-May drew about one million people, and the protests were covered live because of the foreign journalists in Beijing for that visit.
• An unidentified man stood before a column of tanks on 5 June and became known as 'Tank Man'. Zhao Ziyang was replaced by Jiang Zemin and put under house arrest.

Sources: National Security Archive: Tiananmen Square, 1989: The Declassified History; BBC News: Tiananmen Square protest death toll 'was 10,000'; The China Project: No, 10,000 were not killed in China's 1989 Tiananmen crackdown; Britannica: Tiananmen Square incident; Wikipedia: 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and massacre

Jiang Zemin, Hu Jintao, the WTO and the Olympics (Jiang general secretary 1989 to 2002; Hu general secretary 2002 to 2012; WTO entry 11 December 2001; Olympics 8 to 24 August 2008)

Jiang Zemin, an electrical engineer and mayor of Shanghai, succeeded Zhao Ziyang as party leader in 1989 and became president in 1993, combining market reforms with the party's monopoly on political power. After almost 15 years of negotiations, China became the 143rd member of the World Trade Organization on 11 December 2001. Hu Jintao, a hydroelectric engineer, took over the party in November 2002, the presidency in March 2003 and the Central Military Commission in September 2004. Beijing hosted the Summer Olympics of 8 to 24 August 2008, with 204 nations taking part, and China won the most gold medals, 48. In 2010 China became the world's second-largest economy, and Hu passed his posts to Xi Jinping in 2012 and 2013.

• Jiang began a plan in 1997 to reduce state ownership of some of China's 300,000 industries, and he died in Shanghai on 30 November 2022.
• As party secretary in Tibet, Hu Jintao imposed martial law in 1989 in response to unrest there.
• At the closing of the 2022 party congress attendants escorted Hu out of the hall. The official news agency said he was unwell, and some experts speculated about a political motive.

Sources: World Trade Organization: Accessions: China; World Trade Organization: WTO successfully concludes negotiations on China's entry (2001); Britannica: Jiang Zemin; Britannica: Hu Jintao; Wikipedia: 2008 Summer Olympics

Hong Kong, 1997 and after (Joint Declaration 19 December 1984; handover 1 July 1997; national security law 30 June 2020; Jimmy Lai verdict 15 December 2025)

Britain held Hong Kong Island from the 1840s and leased the New Territories for 99 years from 1898, and the Joint Declaration of 19 December 1984 arranged the return of the whole territory on 1 July 1997. Under 'one country, two systems' Hong Kong was to keep its capitalist economy and legal system for 50 years, with Beijing responsible for defence and foreign affairs. Protests against a bill allowing extradition to the mainland broke out in 2019; the bill was suspended on 15 June and withdrawn on 23 October, and 10,279 people were arrested over the course of the protests. China's central government imposed a national security law on 30 June 2020, largely in response to those protests; Hong Kong's government said it restored peace and stability, and critics say it has all but ended dissent. A 2021 election law set 90 legislative seats, 20 of them directly elected, and in 2024 Hong Kong passed its own security ordinance under Article 23 of its Basic Law.

• On 19 November 2024 a court sentenced 45 politicians and activists, up to 10 years for the legal scholar Benny Tai, over an unofficial 2020 primary election; 31 of the 47 charged had pleaded guilty and two were acquitted.
• On 15 December 2025 the media owner Jimmy Lai was found guilty of two counts of conspiracy to collude with foreign forces and one of sedition. Beijing's Hong Kong office welcomed the verdict, and the UK and Taiwan called for his release.
• Hong Kong held an annual vigil for the 1989 Tiananmen dead until the 2020 law; several former organisers were later jailed.

Sources: Al Jazeera: Hong Kong jails 45 pro-democracy activists in city's largest security case; NPR via KAXE: Hong Kong court convicts pro-democracy activist and mogul Jimmy Lai; Britannica: Hong Kong; Britannica: Tiananmen Square incident; Wikipedia: 2019-2020 Hong Kong protests; Wikipedia: Sino-British Joint Declaration

Xi Jinping (general secretary since November 2012; president since March 2013 (born 15 June 1953); covered here to the end of 2025)

Xi Jinping, General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party and President of the People's Republic, Chinese Communist Party · Beijing

Xi became party leader in November 2012 and president on 14 March 2013, and began an anti-corruption campaign that had punished more than one million officials by late 2017, which also removed political rivals, according to Britannica. His Belt and Road Initiative links trade and infrastructure projects across Asia, Africa, Europe and Latin America. In March 2018 the National People's Congress wrote his ideology into the constitution and ended the presidential term limit, and he won a third term as general secretary in October 2022 and as president on 10 March 2023, as the only candidate, with all 2,952 delegates voting for him. Protests over zero-Covid restrictions after a fatal fire in Urumqi spread to Shanghai, Beijing and other cities in November 2022, and China announced large changes to the policy on 7 December. In 2025 a US-China trade war raised tariffs on many Chinese goods above 140 percent, before both sides eased restrictions by the year's end.

How they came to power: He is the son of Xi Zhongxun, a former deputy prime minister who was often out of favour. Sent to a Shaanxi commune from 1969 to 1975, he studied chemical engineering at Tsinghua and rose through Fujian, Zhejiang and Shanghai to the Politburo Standing Committee in 2007 and the vice presidency in 2008.

How it ended: Living, and still in office at the end of 2025.

• International researchers and US officials say more than one million Uyghurs and other Muslims have been detained in Xinjiang since 2017, and some watchdog groups put the figure closer to 1.8 million. China denies abuses and has called the sites vocational education and training centres, which it says closed in 2019.
• The UN human rights office said on 31 August 2022 that the detentions may constitute crimes against humanity, and the US government declared in 2021 that China's actions constitute genocide. Chinese officials have described such accounts as lies spread by 'anti-China forces'.
• China claims sovereignty over nearly all of the South China Sea, a claim rejected by a ruling of the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague.

Sources: UN Human Rights Office (OHCHR): Assessment of human rights concerns in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (31 August 2022); Council on Foreign Relations: China's Repression of Uyghurs in Xinjiang; Human Rights Watch: The Legacy of the White Paper Protests; Britannica: Xi Jinping; Wikipedia: Xi Jinping