This Week in China’s History: Liu Bang becomes emperor of the Han

February 28, 202 BCE

Listen to the audio narration of this column, read by Kaiser

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One of the most eminent Western historians of early imperial China, Michael Loewe, passed away just two months ago — at the age of 102 — after a long career that included not only a PhD from SOAS and faculty positions at the Universities of London and Cambridge, but also a stint in the legendary cryptography center in Bletchley Park during World War II. Loewe was a key contributor to the effort to crack Japanese codes.

His work in the 1940s was essential to a pivotal era in human history, as the world tottered between fascism and democracy, but Loewe would come to be known more for his expertise on a far earlier, but no less significant era. Writing in the Cambridge History of China, Loewe asserted that “The Han dynasty bequeathed to China an ideal and a concept of empire that survived basically intact for two thousand years. Before Han, imperial government had been experimental and it had become discredited; after Han, it was accepted as the orthodox norm for organizing mankind.”

Loewe’s pronouncement is now decades old, and some would take issue with aspects of what he has written here (the word “basically,” for instance, is doing an awful lot of work in that first sentence). Nevertheless, the legacy of the Han dynasty, in both its actual impact and its symbolism, is enormous, and with that in mind it is worth suggesting that while Qin Shihuang is widely accepted as “the first emperor of China,” we might owe a bit more attention to the coronation of Liu Bang, who assumed the title of emperor on 28 February 202 BCE.