25-907 CE
The Han were the people of China's longest-lasting imperial dynasty, whose name became synonymous with Chinese civilization itself, governing a vast agrarian empire from walled cities connected by roads, canals, and a bureaucracy that no contemporary state could match.
The Han gave their name to the majority ethnic group of China, and for good reason. The Han dynasty, which ruled from 206 BCE to 220 CE, established so many of the patterns of Chinese civilization that "Han" and "Chinese" became interchangeable terms. The game's timeframe picks up with the Eastern Han restoration in 25 CE and stretches through the centuries of division, reunification under the Sui, and the golden age of the Tang, ending with the Tang collapse in 907. Across this enormous span, the underlying culture remained recognizably continuous: the same script, the same agricultural base, the same Confucian ideals of governance, the same conviction that civilization meant walls, records, and proper ritual.
This was not an unchanging society. Buddhism arrived from India and transformed the spiritual landscape. Nomadic invasions shattered the north for centuries. The Tang cosmopolitanism that welcomed Persian merchants and Sogdian musicians to Chang'an was worlds away from the inward-looking court of the late Han. But the thread held.
China's heartland was the great river valleys: the Yellow River in the north, where millet and wheat grew on loess soil, and the Yangtze in the south, where wet-rice paddy agriculture produced the densest caloric yields in the premodern world. A farmer in the Yangtze delta, standing knee-deep in a flooded paddy in July, transplanting rice seedlings by hand into the warm mud, was engaged in the most labor-intensive and most productive form of agriculture on earth. One hectare of paddy could feed a family and still produce surplus for the tax collector.
Villages were dense and permanent: rammed-earth or timber-frame houses clustered along irrigation channels, surrounded by carefully maintained field systems. Silk production was a household industry. A woman unwinding cocoons in a basin of hot water, drawing the single filament onto a reel, produced the commodity that gave the Silk Road its name. Iron tools were mass-produced by state foundries centuries before comparable technology existed in Europe. The population of the Han empire at its peak rivaled that of Rome, and the Tang capital Chang'an was the largest city in the world.
The wall defined the Chinese approach to the steppe frontier. Successive dynasties built, rebuilt, and extended fortifications along the northern border, not as an impermeable barrier but as a system of control: regulating trade, channeling movement, and buying time for garrisons to respond to raids. Wall-building was enormously expensive in labor and materials, and the decision to build or repair a section reflected political priorities as much as military ones. Tens of thousands of conscripted workers hauled rammed earth and stone into position along mountain ridges where the wind never stopped.
The real military challenge was always the steppe. Xiongnu, Xianbei, Turkic, and other nomadic confederations threatened the northern frontier throughout this period. Chinese armies were large, well-equipped, and logistically sophisticated, but heavy infantry and crossbowmen struggled against mobile horse archers in open grassland. The preferred strategy combined diplomacy, trade privileges, marriage alliances, and defensive walls to manage the steppe rather than conquer it.
Confucianism provided the governing ideology: a hierarchical society ordered by ritual propriety, filial piety, and the moral authority of educated officials selected through examination. The civil service examination system, formalized under the Tang, created a meritocratic path to power that was unique in the premodern world. A village boy memorizing the Analerta by lamplight, preparing for the exam that could lift his family from peasant obscurity to official rank, was pursuing the most consequential test in any civilization.
Buddhism arrived along the trade routes in the first and second centuries and spread rapidly, offering personal salvation and monastic community to a population whose Confucian traditions addressed social order but had less to say about death and suffering. Daoist traditions persisted alongside both, concerned with health, longevity, and harmony with the natural world. A Tang-era household might honor Confucian propriety in its family relationships, visit a Buddhist temple for funeral rites, and consult a Daoist practitioner about medicine, seeing no contradiction between the three.
The Silk Road connected Han and Tang China to Central Asia, Persia, India, and ultimately the Mediterranean. Chinese silk, porcelain, and paper traveled west; horses, glassware, and religions traveled east. Chang'an in the eighth century was the most cosmopolitan city on earth: Sogdian wine merchants, Persian Zoroastrian priests, Nestorian Christians, Arab traders, Korean scholars, and Japanese monks all walked its gridded streets. A Sogdian innkeeper pouring grape wine for a Tang official and a Turkic horse trader in the same evening was conducting business at the center of the world.
Chinese technological innovations of this period, paper, printing, gunpowder, the magnetic compass, would eventually transform the rest of the world, though centuries passed before most of them traveled far enough west to have that effect. The bureaucratic model, the examination system, and the Confucian scholarly tradition shaped East Asian civilization from Korea to Vietnam. The name Han endured as an identity long after the dynasty itself was a memory, proof that a civilization built on written records, agricultural surplus, and competent administration could outlast any single ruling house.
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they must pay +1 
for each of your 
, then gain 4 
In the game, the Han start with an asymmetric setup: 8 fewer resources but 4 extra peasants, a populous empire short on supplies. Wall sections earn glory but slow your economy, so save them for later rounds unless you face immediate pressure. Products from each province during the achievement phase reward expansion, and the mead surcharge on opponents adopting your technologies protects your research investment. Consider delaying exploration by one round until you receive your first free product, and use the early turns to trade on the market where your large workforce gives you gathering power nobody else can match yet.
You start with 9 peasants: the standard 5 that all players receive, plus 4 additional from your instant ability. You also start with 8 fewer resources than normal.
No. The ability specifically grants glory for wall sections only. Palisade sections do not trigger this bonus.
The mead returns to the general supply, not to you. The ability makes adoption more expensive for other players but does not generate income for you.
Yes. For each province you gain 1 product, and you choose the type independently for each province.