Han Dynasties

The Han Dynasties: From Imperial Foundation to Guangwu's Restoration

This chapter uses the Records of the Grand Historian, the Book of Han, and the Book of the Later Han to connect figures from the Qin-Han transition through Western and Eastern Han. Because the three histories differ in date, scope, and naming, the graph preserves each citation and does not merge officials, consorts, or imperial relatives merely because they share a name.

422 figures in this chapter, 53 of whom appear in both history and fiction.

Event · 23 CEBattle of KunyangLiu Xiu led a small assault against the center of Wang Mang's army while Kunyang's defenders attacked from within. Wang Xun was killed and Wang Yi's force collapsed, marking a turning point toward the fall of Xin and the rise of Eastern Han.

What each of the three histories covers

The Records of the Grand Historian provides continuity across the Qin-Han transition and early Han. The Book of Han systematically records Western Han, while the Book of the Later Han continues with Eastern Han annals, biographies, and treatises. A figure's absence from one sampled text does not prove that the historical tradition denied that person existed.

Names are separated by occurrence evidence

Han sources repeatedly use temple names, posthumous titles, offices, and courtesy names. The merge pipeline favors full names and reviewed identity bridges; risky homonyms are split with exact book, chapter, and occurrence selectors. When identity remains uncertain, the graph keeps two records rather than welding together unrelated careers and relationships.

The Battle of Kunyang as an event entry point

The Book of the Later Han records Liu Xiu leading a small assault against Wang Mang's central formation at Kunyang, where Wang Xun was killed and Wang Yi's army collapsed. The event page joins participants to a verbatim citation, while the graph continues into their links with the Xin regime and the founding coalition of Eastern Han.

Where the three histories place the same man

The Records of the Grand Historian puts Xiang Yu among the Basic Annals, alongside emperors, and closes by granting that “power issued from Yu; he was styled Hegemon-King — and though his position did not last, there has been nothing like it since antiquity.” The History of the Han withholds that rank: Xiang Yu is folded into a joint biography with Chen Sheng, demoted from Annals to Biographies. Yet its appraisal is copied almost verbatim from Sima Qian, rebuke included: he still “invoked ‘Heaven destroys me, it is no fault of my generalship’ — was this not absurd?” The verdict stayed; the rank changed. Jia Yi runs the other way. The Records attaches him to the joint “Biographies of Qu Yuan and Master Jia,” dwelling on slander, banishment to Changsha, and a reader’s bewilderment: “holding life and death as one, taking office and departure lightly, again I was lost.” The History of the Han gives Jia Yi a scroll of his own, quotes his memorials at length, and calls him one who “penetrated the substance of the state; even Yi Yin and Guan Zhong of old could not have far surpassed him.” The Book of the Later Han (“Biography of Ban Biao, part 2”) has a ready verdict on the two styles: “Qian’s prose is direct and his facts verified; Gu’s prose is ample and his facts detailed.”

What the strange tales supply that the histories omit

The Book of the Later Han (“Annals of Emperor Xian”) gives only a cause of death for Sun Ce: he “was wounded by an arrow from Xu Gong’s retainers.” In Search of the Supernatural (scroll 1) supplies a whole chain of cause instead. Sun Ce forced the adept Yu Ji to pray for rain; the rain came, “by midday a great rain arrived,” and Sun Ce killed him anyway. Afterward he kept sensing Yu Ji beside him, and as the wound was healing he looked into a mirror and “saw Ji in the mirror, but turned and saw nothing.” At the third time he “struck the mirror and cried out; his sores all split open, and in a moment he was dead.” The rain answered and the man was killed regardless: that hinge is absent from the history. With Dong Zhuo the direction reverses. The grotesque detail that after his execution “the corpse guard set a fire in Zhuo’s navel, and it burned bright until dawn, for days on end” comes from the Book of the Later Han itself, not from a later novel.

Dual-identity figures

Compiled with AI assistance from public-domain texts, with every claim checked against its source. For cultural reference.