East Asia (909 BCE – 819 CE): Empires of the Earth and Sea — Dynastic Order, Steppe Frontiers, and the Silk Roads

Regional Overview

From the Yellow River to the Pacific and from the Mongolian steppe to the Tibetan Plateau, East Asia during the first millennium BCE through the early centuries CE was a continent of convergences.
Agrarian states and dynastic empires took root along the river plains, while nomadic confederations and frontier kingdoms moved across the grasslands and highlands that rimmed them.
Maritime and overland corridors—Silk Roads on land, monsoon routes at sea—bound together worlds as different as the Confucian court and the shamanic tent.
By the early Tang centuries (7th–8th CE), East Asia stood as a fully integrated macro-region, its heartland in the Chinese empires, its limbs stretching across Korea, Japan, and the nomadic and oasis realms of Central and Inner Asia.

Geography and Environment

East Asia straddles four great ecological zones:

1. The riverine basins of the Yellow and Yangtze Rivers, sustaining dense agrarian populations.

2. The steppe–desert belt of Mongolia and northern China, cradle of mounted nomadism.

3. The Himalayan and Tibetan highlands, where pastoralism and Buddhism would later entwine.

4. The maritime rim—Korea, Japan, Taiwan, and the coastal provinces of China—where oceanic and continental influences met.

Climate oscillated between colder, drier pulses and warmer, wetter intervals, influencing both dynastic expansion and steppe migrations.
The East Asian monsoon determined not only crop yields but also trade winds, linking agrarian cycles to navigation across the Yellow, East China, and South China Seas.

Societies and Political Developments

The Agrarian Heartlands

The Zhou dynasty (1046–256 BCE) initiated the feudal order that structured Chinese governance for centuries: hierarchies of lords, bureaucrats, and ritual specialists sustained by agricultural tribute.
Its decline gave rise to the Warring States era, when states such as Qin, Chu, and Zhao transformed warfare, irrigation, and administration.
The Qin dynasty (221–206 BCE) unified the empire under a legalist system, standardizing weights, measures, and the written script.

The Han dynasty (206 BCE–220 CE) institutionalized imperial bureaucracy and expanded agriculture through canal and dike construction, integrating frontier territories from Korea to Yunnan.
Later dynasties—the Three Kingdoms, Jin, and the Northern and Southern Dynasties—continued to compete for the central plain until the Tang (618–907 CE) restored durable unity and cultural brilliance.

The Northern and Western Frontiers

Beyond the Great Wall, nomadic confederations—the Xiongnu, Xianbei, and later the Türkic Khaganates—dominated the steppe.
Their mobility and horse mastery reshaped trade and war; their diplomacy alternated between alliance and incursion.
The Tibetan Plateau, unified under the Tubo Empire (7th–9th CE), became a trans-Himalayan power controlling routes to India and Central Asia.
In the Tarim Basin, oasis kingdoms such as Khotan, Turpan, and Kucha flourished as cosmopolitan waypoints on the Silk Road.

The Maritime Rim

Across the seas, Korea evolved through the Gojoseon and Three Kingdoms (Goguryeo, Baekje, Silla), culminating in Silla’s unification of the peninsula in the late 7th century CE.
Japan moved from the agrarian Yayoi period into the Kofun and Asuka ages, adopting writing, Buddhism, and bureaucratic models from the continent.
Taiwan’s Austronesian peoples remained within a maritime network stretching toward the Philippines and Southeast Asia, linking East Asia to the Pacific world.

Economy and Exchange

Agriculture—millet and wheat in the north, rice in the south—formed the imperial base, supported by state-run granaries and canal transport.
Artisan production and trade expanded through both overland and maritime routes:

• The Silk Road carried textiles, jade, and lacquerware westward, returning with glass, horses, and precious metals.

• The maritime circuits connected Guangzhou and the lower Yangtze with India, Southeast Asia, and Arabia, foreshadowing the oceanic commerce of later centuries.

Iron plows, blast furnaces, and advanced irrigation sustained population growth.
Urban markets in Chang’an, Luoyang, and coastal ports transformed consumption and social mobility, while border trade with nomads exchanged silk for horses, ensuring both sides’ survival.

Technology and Material Culture

Innovation defined the region:

• Iron and steel tools revolutionized agriculture and warfare.

• Papermaking (Han dynasty) and later printing (Tang) reshaped knowledge transmission.

• Compass prototypes, sternpost rudders, and bulkheaded ships made China’s sailors the engineers of the early world ocean.

• Bronze and lacquer arts, porcelain experiments, and calligraphy turned everyday materials into expressions of order and beauty.

Steppe metallurgy, Tibetan textiles, and Korean–Japanese bronze mirrors illustrate the dynamic exchange between frontier and heartland.

Belief and Symbolism

East Asia’s spiritual landscape was a triad of Confucian order, Daoist nature, and Buddhist transcendence, each blending with indigenous shamanic and animist traditions.
The Mandate of Heaven linked cosmic harmony to political legitimacy; rulers governed as intermediaries between Earth and Sky.
Buddhism, introduced via Central Asia in the first centuries CE, merged with local pantheons to produce new art, literature, and architecture—from Yungang’s cave temples to Nara’s wooden halls.
In the steppe, sky cults and ancestral rites sanctified mobility and kinship; in the islands, nature spirits, kami, and bodhisattvas intertwined.

Movement and Interaction Corridors

The Silk Road traversed deserts and mountains from Chang’an to Samarkand, distributing goods and ideas.
Parallel steppe corridors linked Mongolia to Eastern Europe, carrying mounted warriors and technologies westward.
The maritime highways—through the Korean Strait, Taiwan Strait, and South China Sea—connected East Asia to Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean.
Collectively these arteries made the region not an isolated terminus but a circulatory system of the Old World.

Adaptation and Resilience

Environmental and political shocks—floods, nomadic invasions, dynastic collapse—were countered through infrastructural resilience: canals, dikes, and social hierarchies distributed risk.
In frontier zones, mixed economies (pastoral + agrarian) absorbed climate stress.
Maritime redundancy ensured trade continuity even when overland routes faltered.
Cultural syncretism itself became an adaptive strategy: by integrating outside ideas, East Asia renewed rather than ruptured its civilizational fabric.

Regional Synthesis and Long-Term Significance

By 819 CE, East Asia had matured into one of the world’s great civilizational ecosystems—a dynamic equilibrium of empire and frontier, plow and saddle, brush and sail.
Its Maritime sphere (China–Korea–Japan–Taiwan) perfected bureaucratic and technological systems that would radiate outward through the seas, while its Upper sphere (Mongolia–Tibet–Xinjiang) remained the strategic high ground linking China to the heart of Eurasia.

Together they formed a single macro-region defined by circulation: of goods, of peoples, of cosmologies.
Their differences—continental and oceanic, sedentary and nomadic, Confucian and shamanic—were not contradictions but complements.
Thus, the natural division of East Asia into its Maritime and Upper subregions mirrors its very logic: a world balanced between the order of the land and the freedom of the wind.

Maritime East Asia (909 BCE – CE 819): Imperial Centers, Maritime Trade, and Cultural Flourishing

Geographic and Environmental Context

Maritime East Asia includes eastern China, Taiwan, the Korean Peninsula, and Japan.

• The subregion spans fertile river valleys such as the Yangtze and Yellow River basins, mountainous interiors, and extensive coastal plains.

• Offshore, the East China Sea, Yellow Sea, and Sea of Japan connect the mainland to island territories, while major straits such as the Tsushima and Taiwan Straits serve as maritime gateways.

Climate and Environmental Shifts

• The East Asian monsoon dominates the seasonal cycle, bringing wet summers and cold, dry winters to the mainland and peninsulas.

• Periodic climatic fluctuations, including colder intervals in the early first millennium CE, influenced agricultural productivity and population distribution.

• Typhoons posed recurring threats to coastal settlements and maritime activity.

Societies and Political Developments

• In China, this period encompassed the Eastern Zhou, Qin, and Han dynasties, followed by the Three Kingdoms, Jin, and the Northern and Southern Dynasties, leading into the Tang dynasty by the early 8th century CE.

• Korea saw the emergence and consolidation of the Three Kingdoms—Goguryeo, Baekje, and Silla—followed by Silla’s unification of most of the peninsula in the late 7th century CE.

• Japan transitioned from the Yayoi agricultural period to the Kofun and Asuka periods, with increasing state centralization and cultural borrowing from the mainland.

• Taiwan was home to Austronesian-speaking societies linked to maritime networks extending into Southeast Asia and the Pacific.

Economy and Trade

• Agriculture, especially rice cultivation in paddy fields, formed the economic base, supplemented by wheat, millet, and barley in northern zones.

• Silk, lacquerware, ceramics, and metal goods were major exports from China to Central Asia, Southeast Asia, and beyond.

• Maritime trade linked the Chinese and Korean coasts to Japan, Taiwan, and Southeast Asia, moving goods such as textiles, tools, salt, and luxury items.

• Urban markets in capitals like Chang’an and Luoyang became hubs of domestic and international commerce.

Subsistence and Technology

• Advanced irrigation systems supported high-yield rice agriculture.

• Iron and steel production expanded, improving agricultural tools, weapons, and construction.

• Shipbuilding technology progressed, with larger ocean-going vessels facilitating long-distance trade.

• Written scripts, including Chinese characters, were adopted or adapted in Korea and Japan.

Movement and Interaction Corridors

• Overland routes connected Lower East Asia to Central Asia via the Silk Road, facilitating exchange of goods, ideas, and technologies.

• Maritime routes across the Yellow and East China Seas enabled diplomatic, cultural, and economic ties between China, Korea, and Japan.

• Coastal navigation linked Taiwan to the Fujian and Guangdong coasts, forming part of a broader Austronesian maritime sphere.

Belief and Symbolism

• Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism shaped governance, art, and daily life, with Buddhism spreading from China into Korea and Japan.

• Monumental architecture, including palace complexes, pagodas, and tomb mounds, reflected political authority and religious devotion.

• Decorative arts often carried symbolic motifs representing prosperity, protection, and cosmic order.

Adaptation and Resilience

• Regional specialization in crops and crafts reduced dependence on any single resource.

• State-managed granaries and transportation networks helped buffer against famine.

• Cross-cultural diplomacy maintained stability and trade even during periods of political fragmentation.

Long-Term Significance

By CE 819, Maritime East Asia had become a dynamic nexus of political power, cultural innovation, and maritime exchange, influencing the economic and intellectual life of much of Eurasia.

Reforms are further consolidated and codified in 701 under the Taiho-ryoritsu (Great Treasure Code, known as the Taiho Code), which, except for a few modifications and being relegated to primarily ceremonial functions, will remain in force until 1868.

The Taiho Code provides for Confucian-model penal provisions (light rather than harsh punishments) and Chinese-style central administration through the Department of Rites, which is devoted to Shinto and court rituals, and the Department of State, with its eight ministries (for central administration, ceremonies, civil affairs, the imperial household, justice, military affairs, people's affairs, and the treasury).

A Chinese-style civil service examination system based on the Confucian classics is also adopted.

Tradition circumvents the system, however, as aristocratic birth continue to be the main qualification for higher position.

The Taiho Code does not address the selection of the sovereign.

Several empresses reign from the fifth to the eighth centuries, but after 770 succession is restricted to males, usually from father to son, although sometimes to brother or uncle.

The Japanese capital was customarily moved after the death of an emperor, before the Taiho Code was established, because of the ancient belief that a place of death was polluted.

Reforms and bureaucratization of government led to the establishment of a permanent imperial capital at Heijokyo, or Nara, in 710. (Previously the capital had been about twenty-five kilometers south of Nara, in and around Asuka, the name given by some historians to the pre-Nara period [538-710] and art style.)

The capital at Nara, which gives its name to the new period (710-94), is styled after the grand Chinese Tang Dynasty (618-907) capital at Chang' an and is the first truly urban center in Japan.

It soon has a population of two hundred thousand, representing nearly our percent of the country's population, and some ten thousand people work in government jobs.

Heijo (Nara), founded in 706 as the intended seat of the Japanese government, modeled after the Chinese T'ang dynasty's capital of Ch’ang-an (Xi'an), is completed in 710.

The city becomes the permanent seat of Japanese government, inaugurating the so-called Nara period.

The Chinese-influenced “Tachibana Shrine,” a miniature shrine owned by the Horyu temple in Nara expresses the complex iconography of Amida, the Buddha of the Western Paradise, in the triad of Amida and two bodhisattvas seated on lotus pedestals rising from a pond; behind them stands a low-relief bronze screen portraying a placid scene of the souls reborn in the Western Paradise.

The site of the Japanese capital had been moved in 710 to the northwest sector of the Nara Basin.

(The new capital, called Heijo-kyo, is known today as Nara.)

Overcrowding, the relative isolation of the Fujiwara capital, and what will prove to be a constant nemesis to the Japanese state, an overly powerful Buddhist establishment, had been some of the main factors contributing to the move.

The Kojiki (Record of Ancient Matters), the earliest written Japanese history, is compiled in 712 by court officials on the order of the empress Genmei.

The 43rd imperial ruler of Japan, according to the traditional order of succession, and the fourth woman to hold such a position, she had been a daughter of Emperor Tenji and the wife of Crown Prince Kusakabe no Miko, who had been the son of Emperor Temmu and Empress Jitō.

Kusakabe was also Genmei's first cousin and her nephew.

After their son Emperor Mommu died in 707, she had succeeded to the throne, in hopes of holding it until her grandson, Prince Obito reached maturity.

The initial attempts of her father-in-law, Emperor Temmu, in 680, had failed to finalize the publication of the Kojiki before his death in 686, and Genmei has continued the commission during her reign.

The first section, entitled “The Age of the Gods,” is a mythical telling of the creation of the world, In describing the descent from heaven of Ninigi, grandson of the Sun goddess Amaterasu, the legendary ancestor of the imperial family, the Kojiki establishes the divine origin of Japan's imperial dynasty and its right to rule over the country.

The second and third sections contain semi-historical traditions about the history of Japan down to the beginning of the seventh century.

The Tang capital, Chang'an (present-day Xi'an), is the most populous city in the world at this time.

The first century of the Tang dynasty has so far been one of the most prosperous and brilliant periods in the history of Chinese civilization.

The empire now extends so far across Central Asia that for a while Bukhara and Samarkand are under Chinese control, the Central Asian kingdoms pay China tribute, and Chinese cultural influence reaches Korea and Japan.

Chang'an has become the greatest city in the world; its streets are filled with foreigners, and foreign religions—including Zoroastrianism, Buddhism, Manichaeism, Nestorianism, Christianity, Judaism, and Islam—flourish.

This confident cosmopolitanism is reflected in all the arts of this period.

Li Longji, born in 685 into an era when power was virtually in the hands of his grandmother, the Empress Wu Zetian, widow of Emperor Zhongzong, had become the only glimmer of hope for the restoration of the imperial Li family.

His aunt, the Princess Taiping, daughter of the Empress, had fiercely protected Longji from harm by the Wu family.

In conspiring with Princess Taiping to put an end to the Empress’s attempted usurpation of power, Longji had killed Empress Wei in 710 a palace coup which had placed his own father, Emperor Ruizong, on the throne.

Longji had been appointed chancellor for a few months before becoming the crown prince.

Tensions between Princess 'aiping and Li Longji had soon mounted, however.

Princess Taiping, who has many supporters at court, hopes to ascend the imperial throne as her mother Empress Wu had done.

Ruizong exiles his sister to the provinces, hoping to defuse tension, but Longji, who fears that Princess Taiping would hold him responsible for her exile and would have him murdered, asks his father to recall the princess, who is allowed to return to the imperial court.

Eventually, in September 712, a disgruntled Ruizong, tired of court feuds, abdicates in favor of his son, who becomes Emperor Tang Xuanzong.

Suddenly it is Princess Taiping who is at risk of falling victim.

Alarmed by Ruizong's decision, the princess manages to have the court name him Taishang Huang (sometimes translated as "retired emperor", or "emperor emeritus"), a position in which Ruizong is to keep effective control of power with the new emperor Xuangzong only formally attending court audiences and ceremonies.

Appointments to high offices, controlled by Ruizong, are filled with the Princess' supporters.

Empress Gemmei had in 714 appointed thirteen-year-old Obito as crown prince.

In 715, now in her fifties, the empress abdicates in favor of her daughter Hidaka because of her age and the youth of Obito.

Obito remains as the crown prince of the new monarch, who is known as Empress Gensho.

The Japanese ritsuryo system, the governmental structure defined by ritsu, the criminal code, and ryo, the administrative and civil codes, is an imitation of the lü-ling log in force in T'ang China and incorporates many of its original articles.

Where different local conditions call for amendment, however, they are made without hesitation; it is a good early example of the skill of the Japanese in adapting foreign culture.

The features had first been delineated in rough form in the Taika edicts, but then had been refined—perhaps first by Tenji in the Omi Code and then by Temmu—and certainly given final form in the Taiho Code of 701 and its successor, the Yoro Code of 718.

Under the ritsuryo system, the Japanese emperor, for example, is in some respects an absolute monarch who rules over the whole country as the head of a bureaucracy in the same manner as the emperor of China.

Yet at the same time, he is also the traditional high priest who maintains peace for the land and people by paying tribute to the deities and sounding out their will.

The people are divided into two main classes, freemen and slaves.

The slaves are the possession of the government, the aristocracy, and the shrines and temples; as such, they are obliged to provide unlimited labor, but their total number accounts for less than one-tenth of the population.

The majority of the free population are farmers.

All land is, in principle, the property of the state.

Most of the land is distributed equally among the people, but, apart from this, land of a certain annual yield is given to bureaucrats and other high-ranking persons as stipends and to Shinto shrines and Buddhist temples as sources of revenue.

Vairocana, also called Mahavairocana (“Great Illuminator”), the supreme Buddha, as regarded by many Mahayana Buddhists of East Asia and of Tibet, Nepal, and Java, is given reverence by Buddhists of the Yogacara school in China and Japan, (which will lead to the foundation of the Shingon sect in Japan).

Legend claims that he transmitted to a supernatural personage, Vajrasattva, the Yoga doctrine, which is in turn introduced into China in 719 by Vajrabodhi.