Han Syncretism and the Rise of Neo-Confucianism

Following the short-lived Qin dynasty's collapse, the Han dynasty (206 BCE-220 CE) gradually settled on Confucianism, substantially reshaped, as state orthodoxy, a process most closely associated with the scholar-official Dong Zhongshu (c. 179-104 BCE), who advised Emperor Wu of Han around 136 BCE to establish the Confucian Five Classics as the sole basis of an official curriculum and, eventually, the imperial examination system for selecting officials. Dong Zhongshu's own synthesis wove Confucian ethics together with the Yin-Yang school's cosmology of yin-yang and the Five Phases, developing an elaborate correlative cosmology in which human conduct, especially the ruler's virtue or vice, was held to resonate directly with natural phenomena — including omens, portents, and disasters — binding Heaven, earth, and the human political order into a single interdependent system that gave Confucian ethics new cosmological authority while also absorbing important elements from rival Warring States traditions rather than simply restoring pre-Qin Confucianism unchanged.