The ground you walk on

Bronze kings, and the idea of heaven

Before China was China, the river valleys held walled chiefdoms and bronze-working kings. The Shang gave us the first Chinese writing; the Zhou gave rebellion its vocabulary.

In the Yangtze delta, Liangzhu (c. 3300–2300 BCE) built a stratified, walled society that UNESCO inscribed in 2019. The Xia, traditionally founded by Yu the Great, is the first dynasty in Chinese historiography but has no contemporaneous records; many archaeologists identify it with the Erlitou culture.

The Shang (c. 1600–1046 BCE) ruled the Yellow River valley from Yinxu near Anyang, where more than 20,000 inscribed oracle bones were recovered in the 1920s–30s — the earliest known Chinese writing. The Zhou (c. 1046–256 BCE) held power for 790 years; bronze casting peaked, and Confucianism, Daoism and Legalism emerged. Their claim that a king ruled because he held the Mandate of Heaven became the sentence every later rebellion borrowed.

Mount Tai was already a place of imperial sacrifice in the Zhou, before 1000 BCE.

The first empire, measured in axle widths

In 221 BCE Qin Shi Huang ended five centuries of rivalry and defined what “one China” meant in practice. The Han then gave the country its name for itself.

Ying Zheng conquered the last rival states in 221 BCE, took the title Qin Shi Huang, and standardised currency, weights, measures and the writing system. His labour levies joined the northern walls that became the base of the Great Wall and built a mausoleum guarded by the Terracotta Army. The dynasty fell in 206 BCE, but its administrative model carried through the Han and in some form to 1911.

Liu Bang founded the Han in 202 BCE. After Wang Mang's Xin interregnum (9–23 CE) it continued as the Eastern Han until 220. Han armies took the Hexi Corridor and the Tarim Basin from the Xiongnu, opening the Silk Road; from Emperor Wu's reign (141–87 BCE) the court officially sponsored Confucianism. Most Chinese still call themselves Han.

The Buddhist centuries

Four hundred years of division carried Buddhism across China and cut the great cave temples into the rock. Reunification came from the Sui, and the Tang made Chang'an a world city.

Cao Wei, Shu Han and Eastern Wu split China from 220 to 280, a period of plague, famine and civil war; a 280 census after Jin reunification counted 16.2 million people against 56.5 million under the Han. The Northern and Southern dynasties (420–589) brought mass migration south, Mahayana Buddhism and Daoism, and the carving of Yungang, Longmen and the first Mogao caves. Sui reunification ended the division in 589.

The Sui (581–618) rebuilt Luoyang in 605 and dug the Grand Canal, whose conscription burden helped sink the dynasty. The Tang that followed is widely regarded as a high point of Chinese civilisation; Chang'an was the world's most populous city for much of the period, and the An Lushan rebellion (755–763) began its long decline.

The commercial turn

Under the Song, cities, print and money created an economy that feels recognisably modern. The Mongols then reunified China from a new capital beside the old one — Beijing.

The Northern Song ruled from Bianjing (Kaifeng) until the Jurchen Jin took the north in 1127; the Southern Song court then held the south from Lin'an (Hangzhou) until the Mongols ended the dynasty in 1279. The period produced the first surviving gunpowder formulas, the first use of the compass to find true north, movable-type printing, and the lakeside culture of West Lake, while Liao, Western Xia and Jin controlled the north.

Kublai Khan moved the Mongol capital from Karakorum, built Khanbaliq beside the old Jurchen capital, and proclaimed the Yuan in 1271; the Southern Song fell at Yamen in 1279. It was the first dynasty of non-Han origin to rule all of China proper. Quanzhou anchored the maritime trade network UNESCO inscribed in 2021.

The Ming blueprint

The Ming built the wall and the palace that most visitors still picture when they picture China. Zheng He's fleets went further, to Arabia and East Africa.

The Hongwu Emperor drove out the Yuan in 1368 and founded the last imperial dynasty ruled by Han Chinese. The Yongle Emperor rebuilt Beijing around the Forbidden City, restored the Grand Canal and from 1405 sent Zheng He's fleets into the Indian Ocean as far as Arabia and East Africa.

Most surviving sections of the Great Wall are Ming rebuilding; the dynasty fell to Li Zicheng's rebellion in 1644.

The Qing inheritance, and the modern remaking

The last dynasty made the largest Chinese empire, then lost it in a revolution. The twentieth century rebuilt the country's cities — and much of what tourists now visit.

The Manchu Later Jin was proclaimed the Qing in Shenyang in 1636 and took Beijing in 1644. Under the Kangxi (1661–1722) and Qianlong (1735–1796) emperors it became the most populous state in the world, with more than 426 million people by 1907 and the largest territory of any Chinese dynasty. The Xinhai Revolution of October 1911 forced the last emperor's abdication in February 1912.

The Republic of China was proclaimed on 1 January 1912. The Nationalist government, in Nanjing from 1928, lost the civil war and retreated to Taiwan in 1949. The treaty-port architecture of the Shanghai Bund, and the parks, museums and research bases that now anchor Chinese tourism, belong to this century rather than to the dynastic sequence.