Asian
Dynasties

A long quiet across long centuries. Tang, Song, Ming, Qing, Tokugawa, Joseon — empires that ruled, often, more populations than all of Europe combined, and that wrote some of the most beautiful sentences in any language.

Each section a small breath. Read slowly.

The first golden age

The Tang dynasty, founded by Li Yuan in 618 after the brief Sui reunification, governed perhaps the most cosmopolitan empire of the medieval world. Its capital Chang'an (modern Xi'an) was, at its eighth-century peak, a city of more than a million people on a strict grid five times the size of contemporary Constantinople. Persian merchants, Sogdian traders, Korean scholars, Japanese envoys, and Tibetan diplomats walked its avenues. Buddhism, having entered China during the Han, flowered under Tang patronage; the monk Xuanzang's seventeen-year journey to India (629–645) returned with hundreds of sutras and is the historical core of the great later novel Journey to the West.

The Tang civil service was the first in any society to be opened, in principle, to candidates by competitive examination on the Confucian classics — though aristocratic families still dominated in practice. The empire's cosmopolitanism was finally broken by the An Lushan Rebellion (755–763), which killed perhaps tens of millions and shifted the dynasty's centre eastward. By the early tenth century the Tang had crumbled into the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms.

The first modern economy

The Song dynasty, founded by Zhao Kuangyin in 960, was militarily smaller than the Tang and culturally more inward, but it presided over what historians of economic life sometimes call the world's first industrial revolution. Iron output in eleventh-century China — about 125,000 tonnes a year — was not surpassed in Europe until the eighteenth century. Movable-type printing was invented by Bi Sheng around 1040. Paper money, the magnetic compass for navigation, and the practical use of gunpowder all date from Song innovations or refinements.

The Song capital Kaifeng was a city of perhaps a million people, painted with extraordinary documentary fidelity in Zhang Zeduan's scroll Along the River During the Qingming Festival. After the Jurchen invasion of 1127 the dynasty retreated south to Hangzhou, where Marco Polo, two centuries later, would find the most beautiful city in the world. Neo-Confucianism — the synthesis of classical Confucian ethics with Buddhist metaphysics — was perfected by Zhu Xi (1130–1200) and would dominate east Asian intellectual life until the twentieth century.

The last empire

The Qing was the second non-Han dynasty (after the Yuan) to govern all of China. Manchu rulers preserved their distinct identity — banner organisation, queue hairstyle imposed on the conquered, separate Manchu administrative tracks — while adopting Confucian governance and patronising Chinese arts. The Kangxi (r. 1661–1722), Yongzheng (r. 1722–35), and Qianlong (r. 1735–96) emperors form one of the longest stretches of effective rule in any large state's history. Under them the population doubled, from perhaps 150 million to 300 million, and the empire reached its greatest extent — from Mongolia to Tibet, Xinjiang, and Taiwan.

The nineteenth century, however, broke it. The Opium Wars (1839–42, 1856–60) imposed treaty ports and the cession of Hong Kong; the Taiping Rebellion (1850–64), led by a man who believed himself the brother of Jesus Christ, killed perhaps 20 to 30 million people; the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–95 humiliated Qing China; and the Boxer Uprising of 1900 ended in foreign occupation of Beijing. The dynasty fell, with the abdication of the six-year-old Puyi, on 12 February 1912. The imperial system that had governed China for 2,133 years ended that morning.

The hermit kingdom

The Joseon dynasty, founded by Yi Seong-gye in 1392, was the longest-ruling Confucian dynasty in any culture — over five centuries. Its founders established Hanyang (modern Seoul) as capital, codified neo-Confucian state Confucianism, and created in 1443, under King Sejong the Great, the alphabet now called Hangul: a phonetic writing system designed so that, in Sejong's words, "a wise man can acquaint himself with it before the morning is over."

Joseon survived the Japanese Imjin War (1592–98), brilliantly resisted by Admiral Yi Sun-sin's turtle ships, and the Manchu invasions of the 1620s and 1630s. The eighteenth century saw remarkable scholar-kings (Yeongjo, Jeongjo) and a renaissance of Korean painting, science, and the Sirhak ("Practical Learning") movement. The nineteenth century, like China's and Japan's, brought outside pressure; Korea was annexed by Japan in 1910 in one of the colonial period's harsher dispossessions. Modern Korea — north and south — is still working through that consequence.

After the dynasties

The collapse of the Qing in 1912, of Tokugawa in 1868, and of Joseon in 1910 left east Asia with the project of building modern states out of imperial materials. China's twentieth century — the Republican period, the Japanese invasion, the civil war, the Communist victory of 1949, the Cultural Revolution, the reform era — is in many ways still negotiating the imperial inheritance. Japan's transformation was faster and arguably more total, though the price (imperial expansion, then catastrophic defeat) was severe. Korea was colonised, then divided, then differently transformed in north and south.

The cultural inheritance, in any case, has not vanished. Classical Chinese still anchors literary education across east Asia. Confucian assumptions about family, hierarchy, and learning still shape institutional behaviour from Tokyo to Hanoi. The dynasties are dead. Their habits have, in many quiet ways, outlived them.