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Within the first 3 months after Qin Dynasty emperor Qin Shi Huang's death at Shaqiu , widespread revolts by peasants, prisoners, soldiers and descendants of the nobles of the Six Warring States sprang up all over China. Chen Sheng and Wu Guang , two in a group of about 900 soldiers assigned to defend against the Xiangyu , were the leaders of the first rebellion. Continuous insurgence finally toppled the Qin dynasty in 206 BCE. The leader of insurgents was Xiang Yu, an outstanding military commander without political expertise, who divided the country into 18 feudal states to his own satisfaction. The ensuing war among those states signified the 5 years of Chu Han Contention with Liu Bang, the first emperor of the Han Dynasty, as the eventual winner. The beginning of the Han Dynasty can be dated either from 206 BCE when the Qin dynasty crumbled or 202 BCE when Xiang Yu committed suicide.
The new empire retained much of the Qin administrative structure but retreated a bit from centralized rule by establishing vassal principalities in some areas for the sake of political convenience. After the establishment of the Han Dynasty, Emperor Gao (Liu Bang) divided the country into several "feudal states" to satisfy some of his wartime allies - but planned to get rid of them once he had consolidated his power.
After his death, his successors from Emperor Hui to Emperor Jing tried to rule China combining Legalist methods with the Taoist philosophic ideals. During this "pseudo-Taoism era", a stable centralized government over China was established through revival of the agriculture sectors and fragmentations of "feudal states" after compression of the Rebellion of the seven states.
During the "Taoism era", China was able to maintain peace with Xiongnu by paying tribute and marrying princesses to them. However, Under Emperor Wu's leadership, the most prosperous period ( 140 - 87 BCE)of the Han Dynasty, the Empire was able to fight back. At its height, China incorporated the present-day Qinghai, Gansu, and Vietnam into its territories.
Emperor Wu decided that Taoism was no longer suitable for China, and officially declared China to be a Confucian state; however, like the emperors before him, he combined Legalist methods with the Confucian ideal. This official adoption of Confucianism led to not only a civil service nomination system, but also the compulsory knowledge of Confucian classics of candidates for the imperial bureaucracy, a requirement that lasted up to the establishment of the Republic of China in 1912. Confucian scholars gained prominent status as the core of the civil service.
Emperor Wu also dispatched Zhang Qian twice as his envoy to the Western Regions, and in the process pioneered the route known as the Silk Road from Chang'an (today's Xi'an, Shaanxi Province), through Xinjiang and Central Asia, and on to the east coast of the Mediterranean Sea. Good exchanges such as Chinese silk, Africa ivory, and Roman incense increase the contacts between the East and West. This lead to the introduction of Buddhism to China from India in the first century. See also: silk road
To draw funds for his triumphant campaigns against the Xiongnu, Emperor Wu relinquished land control to merchants and the riches, and in effect legalized the privatization of lands. Land taxes were then drawn based on the sizes of fields, and no longer on harvest. their income and hence could not guarantee to pay their taxes completely. Incomes from selling harvest were often market-driven - a stable amount could not be guaranteed especially after harvest-reducing natural disasters. Merchant and prominent families then lured peasants to sell their lands since land accumulation guaranteed living standards of theirs and their descendants' in the agricultural society of China. Lands were hence accumulating into a new class of landholding families. The Han government in turn imposed more taxes on the remaining independent servants in order to make up the tax losses, therefore encouraging more peasants to come under the landholding elite or the landlords.
Ideally the peasants pay the landlords certain periodic (usually annual) amount of income, who in turn provide protection against crimes and other hazards. In fact an increasing number of peasant population in the prosperous Han society and limited amount of lands provided the elite to elevate their standards for any new subordinate peasants. The inadequate education and often complete illiteracy of peasants forced them into a living of providing physical services, which were mostly farming in an agricultural society. The peasants, without other professions for their better living, compromised to the lowered standard and sold their harvest to pay their landlords. In fact they often had to delay the payment or borrow money from their landlords in the aftermath of natural disasters that reduced harvests. To make the situation worse, some Han reigns ever double-taxed the peasants under the landlords. Eventually the living conditions of the peasants worsened as they solely depended on the harvest of the land they once owned.
The landholding elite and landlords, for their part, provided inaccurate information of subordinate peasants and lands to avoid paying taxes; to this very end corruption and incompetence of the Confucian scholar gentry on economics would play a vital part. Han court officials who attempted to strip lands out of the landlords faced enormous resistance that their policies would never be put in to place. In fact only a member of the landholding families, for instance Wang Meng, was able to put his reforming ideals into effect despite failures of his "turning the clock back" policies.
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