Han people

• Chinese: 漢人 (Hàn rén)

The Han people are the dominant ethnicity of China, constituting as much as 92% of the Chinese population in the late Qing Dynasty, and outnumbering the ruling Manchu ethnic group at that time by around 300 to 1. Originally inhabiting only a small area in what is now considered northwestern China, the Han expanded over the last 3,000 years to become the majority ethnic group of a land area more than 3.5 million square miles in size, and continue to expand today, slowly gaining demographic dominance in areas such as Tibet and Xinjiang. Han people have also emigrated overseas in large numbers for centuries, forming a sizable Chinese diaspora in Southeast Asia, Hawaii, North America, and throughout the world.

Origins & Expansion

Some traditional treatments of Han origins place them as first emerging in the loess plains near the great bend of the Yellow River, in the area surrounding what is today the city of Xi'an. As late as around 1000 BCE, they are believed to have inhabited an area no larger than ten percent of what is today considered "China proper." Other peoples known today as the Yue, Li, Shu, and Zhuang, among others, lived beyond that area.

As early as the 200s BCE, however, the Han people established a strong state, the Qin Dynasty, followed by the Han Dynasty, which controlled a vast area encompassing much of China proper, and even incorporating Vietnam, which was ruled as an integral part of the Chinese empire for as long as a thousand years, from 111 BCE until 939 CE.

Raids and attacks by nomadic peoples from the steppes spurred many Han people to begin migrating south in the 4th-5th centuries CE, however, and by the 8th-12th centuries (Tang Dynasty through Song Dynasties), the ancestral Han homeland in the northwest was surpassed by southern China - especially the Jiangnan area south of the Yangtze River, around Hangzhou, and the southern coastal provinces of Fujian and Guangdong - which now became the center of gravity of Han Chinese population. While the population in northwest China grew by around 50% over the course of the 8th-12th centuries due to regular population growth, that of southwest China multiplied by a factor of seven in that same period, and by the year 1200, as much as 75% of Han people lived in southern China. As late as the 16th century (during the Ming Dynasty), population and settlement remained relatively sparse away from the coast, and many inland areas remained completely undeveloped. While millet and barley remained the chief crops in the north, people in the south took up rice as their staple crop, forming the core of dramatic cultural changes.

References

• Lloyd Eastman, Family, Fields, and Ancestors: Constancy and Change in China's Social and Economic History, 1550-1949, Oxford University Press (1988), 8-.