A report on Han dynasty and Chinese characters

The Qin was followed by the more stable Han dynasty (206 BCE – 220 CE), which established a model for nearly two millennia in which the Chinese empire was one of the world's foremost economic powers.

Their oracle bone script (from BCE) represents the oldest form of Chinese writing yet found and is a direct ancestor of modern Chinese characters.

During the Han dynasty (206 BCE–220 CE), Confucian approaches edged out the "proto-Taoist" Huang–Lao as the official ideology, while the emperors mixed both with the realist techniques of Legalism.

John C. Didier and David Pankenier relate the shapes of both the ancient Chinese characters for Di and Tian to the patterns of stars in the northern skies, either drawn, in Didier's theory by connecting the constellations bracketing the north celestial pole as a square, or in Pankenier's theory by connecting some of the stars which form the constellations of the Big Dipper and broader Ursa Major, and Ursa Minor (Little Dipper).

However, the oppressive government fell soon after his death, and was supplanted by the longer-lived Han dynasty (206 BCE – 220 CE).

With the profound and lasting impacts of this period of Chinese history, the dynasty name "Han" had been taken as the name of the Chinese people, now the dominant ethnic group in modern China, and had been commonly used to refer to Chinese language and written characters.

Tang territory, acquired through the military campaigns of its early rulers, rivaled that of the Han dynasty.

She even introduced numerous revised written characters to the written language, which reverted to the originals after her death.

The Northern Song census recorded 20 million households, double of the Han and Tang dynasties.

This included the universal history text of the Zizhi Tongjian, compiled into 1000 volumes of 9.4 million written Chinese characters.

Shuowen Jiezi is an ancient Chinese dictionary from the Han dynasty.

Although not the first comprehensive Chinese character dictionary (the Erya predates it), it was the first to analyze the structure of the characters and to give the rationale behind them, as well as the first to use the principle of organization by sections with shared components called radicals (bùshǒu 部首, lit. "section headers").

Written Chinese comprises Chinese characters used to represent the Chinese language.

Chinese characters are called hànzì in Mandarin, after the Han Dynasty of China; in Japanese, this was pronounced kanji.

Xu Shen ( CE) was a Chinese calligrapher, philologist, politician, and writer of the Eastern Han Dynasty (25-189).

He was the author of Shuowen Jiezi, which was the first comprehensive dictionary of Chinese characters, as well as the first to organize entries by radical.

Historically, he was often portrayed as a tyrannical ruler and strict Legalist, in part from the Han dynasty's scathing assessments of him.

Perhaps most importantly, the Chinese script was unified.

The Han dynasty annexed Northern and Central Vietnam under Chinese rule from 111 BC, until the first dynasty emerged in 939.

In its early history, Vietnamese writing used Chinese characters (chữ Hán) before a different meaning set of Chinese characters known as chữ Nôm developed between the 7th–13th century.