36 China in World History
ended the practice of peasant conscription (partly out of fear of armed
peasant rebellions) and relied instead on professional armies made
up of voluntary recruits, convicts, and non-Chinese nomads resettled
within the walled frontiers. These professional soldiers easily formed
long-term allegiances to their personal commanders rather than to
the Han court. Thus, when trouble erupted in any one area, armies
were as likely to join in the unrest as to support the court’s attempts
at suppression.
With the central government in complete disarray, it lost the capac-
ity to provide effective relief in times of natural disaster. In 184, a rebel-
lion broke out among the followers of a Daoist religious cult, the Yellow
Turbans, which marked the beginning of the end for the Han dynasty.
The country dissolved into civil war, as numerous generals declared
their independence from the Han and aspired to establish their own
new dynastic rule. They proved incapable of doing so, and what had
been the Han dynasty split up into three rival kingdoms, each led by a
former general or warlord.
The Han dynasty offi cially came to an end in 220 ce, but its leg-
acy was to reach all the way to the twentieth century. Having lasted
more than four centuries, the Han formed the imperial pattern of legal-
ist institutions rationalized by Confucian ideology that was to inspire
every subsequent dynasty until the last (the Qing) fell in 1911. At its
height, the Han court ruled an empire of about two and a half million
square miles (about 70 percent of the contemporary United States) with
sixty million people under its direct control. The Han is often com-
pared to the Roman Empire, as both existed at the same time and were
near equals in size. Han China was relatively land-locked and almost
exclusively agricultural, in contrast to the Roman Empire (known to
the Chinese as the Da Qin or Great Qin Empire) with its many trad-
ing routes on the Mediterranean Sea. And Han China was much more
culturally uniform, with its single written language, its Confucian ideol-
ogy, and its shared elite culture. The Han government and army were
more tightly controlled by one family and its civil offi cials than was the
case in the Roman Empire. And fi nally, although the Han capital of
Luoyang fell almost two centuries before the sack of Rome, in contrast
to the irrevocable breakup of the Roman Empire, the Han pattern of
one vast unifi ed land-based empire was to be repeated again and again
in China into the twentieth century.