The Han Dynasty lasts from roughly 200 BCE to a little after 200 CE, and in my head, I think of it as a bit of a contemporary is the Roman Empire, the 200 years of the Western Han Dynasty correspond roughly to the Roman Republic, and as we get to the Eastern Han Dynasty, that corresponds to really the heyday of the Roman Empire. And it's also a Golden Age of China, a time where science and the arts, and especially Confucianism, begins to really take hold in China, becomes officially part of the civil service, part of the bureaucracy. The Han Dynasty was so successful at unifying China culturally and linguistically that today, 92% of Chinese identify themselves as ethnically Han. So sometimes you'll hear the word Han referring to the Han Dynasty, and sometimes it will be referring to the Han ethnic group, which really derives from the notion of the unification under the Han Dynasty. Now the Han Dynasty, as we see here, ends at the beginning of the third century in the Common Era, and then China gets fragmented again, and it gets split into multiple dynasties. This roughly 360 years that I don't have marked on my timeline, it's not that nothing was happening in China, in fact, a lot was, but China was not unified. To get a sense of that, here is China during the Three Kingdoms period in the third century, shortly after the fall of the Han Dynasty.