East Asia · Confederacies, Han and the steppe
Han Dynasty
drawn on the map AD 1–5, 30–237
Within this Korea-focused grouping, "Han Dynasty" denotes the Chinese Han imperial presence in the northeast, especially the Four Commanderies established after Emperor Wu destroyed Wiman Joseon in 108 BCE—chief among them Lelang (Nangnang), centered near Pyongyang. Lelang endured until 313 CE, when Goguryeo expelled it.
- Shown on the map
- AD 1–5, 30–237 (2 periods)
- Peak area
- 4.6M km²
- Region
- East Asia
Overview
Within this Korea-focused grouping, "Han Dynasty" denotes the Chinese Han imperial presence in the northeast, especially the Four Commanderies established after Emperor Wu destroyed Wiman Joseon in 108 BCE—chief among them Lelang (Nangnang), centered near Pyongyang. Lelang endured until 313 CE, when Goguryeo expelled it. These commanderies were conduits of Chinese writing, bureaucracy, lacquerware, and Confucian culture into the peninsula. (The Han dynasty proper is China's foundational empire, 202 BCE – 220 CE, split into Western and Eastern Han by Wang Mang's Xin interregnum.)
Common questions
- What was the Han Dynasty?
- Within this Korea-focused grouping, "Han Dynasty" denotes the Chinese Han imperial presence in the northeast, especially the Four Commanderies established after Emperor Wu destroyed Wiman Joseon in 108 BCE—chief among them Lelang (Nangnang), centered near Pyongyang. Lelang endured until 313 CE, when Goguryeo expelled it.
- When is the Han Dynasty shown on the map?
- The border data draws the Han Dynasty AD 1–5, 30–237, in 2 separate periods. The source samples borders at fixed dates, so a span can begin late or run on past the end.
- How large was the Han Dynasty?
- At its greatest extent drawn on this map, the Han Dynasty covered about 4.6 million km². That is the largest area the border data gives it across the years it is drawn, not necessarily its greatest extent in history.
Sources
This compendium cites its sources once for the whole document rather than per territory. Its bibliography names the English Wikipedia article for each polity as the basis of these profiles, supplemented by Encyclopaedia Britannica, chinaknowledge.de, the World History Encyclopedia, museum and university sources, and the academic works it lists. The article this entry is anchored on:
- Wikipedia — Han dynasty en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_dynasty
This entry was last updated .
This entry was researched and drafted with AI from the sources above, and has not been reviewed by a historian. How entries are made
Text available under CC BY-SA 4.0: reuse it with a credit to The World Through Time and a link to this page. Passages drawing on the Wikipedia articles listed above are also licensed CC BY-SA 4.0 by their contributors.
Border geometry for the map itself comes from Cliopatria v0.12 (Seshat Global History Databank, CC-BY-4.0).
See the Han Dynasty in its world
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