02
Dynasties
History
From the drums of Chang'an to the axis of the Forbidden City. Every palace is a piece of history you can still walk into.
Chinese history is taught as a list of dynasties, which is why most visitors arrive with a blur of names and no idea which one built the thing they are photographing. This page runs the other way round: each era is introduced by what outlived it, and where that thing is now.
Two corrections worth having before you go. The Great Wall you will walk is Ming — sixteenth century, not third century BC; the earlier walls were rammed earth and mostly are not there any more. And the Forbidden City is Ming in its bones and almost entirely Qing in what you can see inside it.
The eras, and their evidence
8 eras
c. 1600 – 1046 BC
Shang商
The first Chinese dynasty confirmed by its own writing rather than by later legend, and the confirmation is one of the odder stories in archaeology: in the 1890s scholars noticed that 'dragon bones' sold in Beijing pharmacies as medicine were carved with an unknown script.
221 – 206 BC. Fifteen years.
Qin秦
Fifteen years, and the country is still named after it.
206 BC – 220 AD, with a brief interruption
Han汉
Four centuries, and the dynasty that made the culture stick — so completely that the majority ethnicity calls itself Han, the characters are Han characters, and the language is Han speech.
618 – 907
Tang唐
The cosmopolitan peak, and the era Chinese people themselves point to when they want to explain what the country was at its most confident.
960 – 1279
Song宋
The sophisticated one.
1271 – 1368
Yuan元
The Mongol century.
1368 – 1644
Ming明
Han Chinese rule restored, and the dynasty that built most of what you have seen in photographs.
1644 – 1912. The last one.
Qing清
Manchu conquerors from the northeast who took Beijing, ruled for 268 years, and pushed the empire to its greatest extent — Xinjiang, Tibet, Mongolia, Taiwan.
The Republic and everything after it is deliberately outside this page. It is recent, contested, and not what somebody planning a first trip is asking about when they ask which dynasty built the wall.