Imperial China
In the 220s BCE, Qin rapidly conquered the other warring states. In 221, its ruler Qin Shi Huang proclaimed himself the first emperor (皇帝; Huángdì) and founded the Qin dynasty. He led an autocratic Legalist state organized in a system of commanderies and counties. The dynasty lasted only fifteen years, falling soon after his death from revolts and civil war.
After the collapse, the Han dynasty emerged to rule China between 206 BCE and 220 CE. The Han gradually reinstated centralized control, legitimizing their rule through Confucian scholarship and political institutions which would be maintained in some form into the 20th century. Military expeditions against the Xiongnu, a confederation of nomadic steppe tribes, expanded Han influence into parts of Central Asia and helped to establish the Silk Road, allowing for trade connections between China and western Eurasia. Contemporaneously, merchants established maritime trade routes linking China, Southeast Asia, and India. The dynasty is the namesake of the Han Chinese, China's main ethnic group.
The Han faced widespread uprisings and the emergence of local warlords in the 100s and 200s CE. By 220, the empire was split into the Three Kingdoms. These were briefly united by the Jin dynasty in 280, which fell into civil war. Sinicized formerly-nomadic peoples who had settled in Northern China, such as the Xiongnu, rebelled and founded new dynasties. Various Han Chinese dynasties in Southern China emerged in the 300s. During these conflicts, Buddhism was introduced to China via the Silk Road.
China was reunited under the Sui dynasty in 589, which constructed the Grand Canal to link Northern and Southern China. The Sui collapsed in the 610s, and was succeeded by the Tang. The Tang dynasty centralized the state and dispatched military expeditions to pacify the surrounding regions. It promoted Buddhism, but through expanding international trade built a heavily cosmopolitan society centered on its capital of Chang'an. It reformed the civil service examinations and oversaw a flourishing of art, poetry, architecture, and scholarship. The 755–763 An Lushan rebellion weakened the Tang, which gradually fragmented before collapsing completely in 907, resulting in another period of war and division.
The Song dynasty rose to power in 960. It faced military crises, unable to subdue its Sinicized non-Han neighbors, the Khitan-led Liao dynasty and the Tangut-led Western Xia. The Song's consistent focus on defense resulted in a heavily centralized state and military, which made the first military application of gunpowder. Books became widely available by the proliferation of printing technology, while the elite class of scholar-officials grew increasingly powerful. Production, population, and trade expanded massively, alongside innovations such as industrial metallurgy and hydraulic machinery. The Song capital Kaifeng was overrun by the Jurchen-led Jin in 1127, forcing the Song to retreat to Southern China. During this period, the revivalist philosophical movement of Neo-Confucianism emerged.
In 1206, Genghis Khan united the nomadic Mongols to the north under the Mongol Empire. Over the following fifty years, they conquered the Western Xia and the Jin, in addition to their other conquests as far west as Europe. The empire split into separate khanates, with Mongol leader Kublai Khan establishing the Yuan dynasty and subjugating the Song in the 1270s. Although Chinese culture remained largely unchanged, the Yuan maintained a Mongol elite culture and established a complex ethnic and occupational hierarchy. Foreign presence increased as China became more connected to Eurasian trade routes.
In the 1340s, central China was devastated by disease, famine, and severe flooding along the Yellow River. Various rebellions erupted, leading to a peasant leader establishing the Ming dynasty in 1368 and declaring himself the Hongwu Emperor. The Ming later moved their capital from Nanjing to Beijing, with the Forbidden City as the imperial palace. However, the lower Yangtze remained the wealthiest region. Trade grew, and the European colonization of the Americas brought new crops and a massive influx of silver to China. The population doubled, and a growing publishing industry began producing works in vernacular Chinese, including the Four Classic Novels.
The Ming state declined, and by the 1600s, became unable to contain peasant rebellions. The Manchus to the north declared the Qing dynasty in 1636 and conquered the Ming, killing their last claimant emperor in 1662 and conquering a Ming rump state on Taiwan in 1683. From the late 1600s to the end of the 1700s, the High Qing era saw economic growth and territorial expansion westward, including the conquest of Tibet and much of Central Asia.
European powers fought various wars against the Qing dynasty during the 19th century. These began with the United Kingdom's First Opium War in 1839–1842, which resulted in the first of the "unequal treaties" imposed on the dynasty. These opened treaty ports, allowed Christian missionary activity, and loosened trade restrictions. China faced an economic crisis and internal unrest, and uprisings such as the 1850–1864 Taiping Rebellion resulted in the deaths of millions. Reformist factions of the Qing responded with the Self-Strengthening Movement, seeking to adopt Western weapons and technologies, but this had a limited impact for much of the empire.
The Empire of Japan's defeat of the Qing in the First Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895) resulted in the loss of Taiwan and the growth of both reformist and revolutionary political movements. An imperial push for reform in 1898 ended after an internal coup, while the anti-foreign Boxer Rebellion was defeated by a coalition of foreign powers in 1901. The late Qing dynasty again advanced reforms, but growing revolutionary and anti-Manchu sentiment culminated in the 1911 Revolution. A coalition of revolutionaries led by Sun Yat-sen overthrew the Qing and declared the Republic of China (ROC) in 1912.
