Dynasties · 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. This is when the Silk Road opened: an envoy named Zhang Qian was sent west in 138 BC, was captured, escaped, and came back thirteen years later with the first Chinese account of Central Asia. Han tombs produced the jade burial suits — thousands of jade plaques sewn with gold wire — which remain the single most extravagant funerary objects the country ever made.