Marked Xianyang

SubjectIn outline · lessons being written

The First Emperor and the Han

In 221 BC the king of Qin united China and made himself its first emperor, standardising its script, coins and measures. The Han dynasty that followed lasted four hundred years and gave its name to China’s largest people.

Date
221 BC to AD 220VI · The classical world
Place
Xianyang · Chang’an · Mount Li · LuoyangAsia
Laid out as
An empireOne power across a long stretch of time: how it grew, held together, and came apart.
Lessons
6 planned, none written yet

The lessons we plan

Titles may change as they are written

  1. IUniting the Warring States
  2. IIThe terracotta army
  3. IIIOne script, one measure
  4. IVThe Han and the civil service
  5. VPaper
  6. VISima Qian, the Grand Historian

Still to come

The people and objects these lessons will cover

People

  • Qin Shi Huang
  • Liu Bang
  • Emperor Wu
  • Ban Zhao
  • Sima Qian
  • Cai Lun

Objects

  • The terracotta warriors
  • Han jade burial suits
  • A seismoscope design

Where it sits

All of human history, era by era

Early human ancestryOur species and the Old Stone AgeFarming and the New Stone AgeFirst cities and the Bronze AgeThe Iron Age and growing statesThe classical worldAfter the empiresMedieval networks and empiresOceans crossedRevolutions and the first factoriesIndustry, empire and world warThe world since 1945

221 BC to AD 220. Each era is drawn the same width, so the earliest are squeezed: era II alone is over 300,000 years.

Nearby in time and place

This page is an outline. The summary above is a starting point; each lesson, when it is written, will give its sources, its pictures and where historians disagree. Spotted a mistake?