Chinese Dynasty Table

A Chinese dynasty table is a chronological reference for major dynasties, regimes, and historical periods in Chinese history. It helps readers place names such as Xia, Shang, Zhou, Qin, Han, Tang, Song, Yuan, Ming, and Qing in order, while also showing that history was not always a single unified line. Some periods had parallel states, competing regimes, divided north-south governments, or short transitional dynasties. Students, teachers, readers of historical fiction, museum visitors, and genealogy researchers can use the table to connect dates, capitals, founders, and durations. Early dates and period boundaries can vary by textbook and historian, so the table should be treated as a study reference rather than an exhaustive academic chronology.

The dynasty table renders a static JSON dataset of dynasties keyed by id, with start and end years stored as signed integers (negative for BCE, positive for CE). The historical chronology follows the Xia-Shang-Zhou Chronology Project (1996-2000) for pre-imperial dates - Xia c.2070-1600 BCE, Shang c.1600-1046 BCE, Western Zhou 1046-771 BCE - and uses the standard imperial sequence Qin 221-206 BCE, Han 202 BCE-220 CE, through Qing 1644-1912 CE. Era-name (年号) to Gregorian conversion uses the formula gregorian_year = era_start_year + era_year - 1, e.g. Kangxi 30 = 1662 + 30 - 1 = 1691, because era years are 1-indexed (the first year of an era is era_year_1, not era_year_0). The proleptic Gregorian calendar has no year 0, so a span like 5 BCE to 5 CE is 9 years apart, not 10. Duration in years is computed as (end_year - start_year), with overlap cases (Three Kingdoms 220-280, Northern and Southern Dynasties 420-589, Five Dynasties 907-960 with the Ten Kingdoms 902-979) intentionally allowing concurrent rows because the period names are administrative period labels rather than single regimes. The Chinese sexagenary cycle (干支, 60-year ganzhi cycle combining 10 Heavenly Stems and 12 Earthly Branches) gives a parallel cyclic dating system: for any Gregorian year y, the stem index is (y - 4) mod 10 and branch index is (y - 4) mod 12, so 1984 = jia-zi (甲子, stem 0 branch 0), 2024 = jia-chen (甲辰). Lunar dates from primary sources must be converted to the proleptic Gregorian calendar before comparison, because the Chinese civil calendar inserts an intercalary month (闰月, leap month) roughly every 32-33 months to keep lunar months aligned with solar terms; without conversion, events that span a lunar New Year boundary can land in the wrong Gregorian year. The data layer holds the table as a frozen TypeScript array, filtered by an in-page predicate (search by name or era, filter to major unified dynasties), so rendering is O(n) over ~30-40 entries and no remote lookup is performed.

• Era-name conversion: gregorian_year = era_start_year + era_year - 1; era years are 1-indexed so Kangxi 1 = 1662 (not 1661).
• Proleptic Gregorian has no year 0; the span from 1 BCE to 1 CE is 1 year, and from 5 BCE to 5 CE is 9 years; ISO 8601 represents 1 BCE as 0000, which differs from the BCE/CE convention used here.
• Sexagenary cycle: stem = (year - 4) mod 10, branch = (year - 4) mod 12; 60-year cycle, so 1984 = 甲子 = 2044.
• Xia and early Shang dates follow the Xia-Shang-Zhou Chronology Project (1996-2000) and remain approximate; pre-841 BCE dates are reconstructed and can shift by decades between textbooks.
• Duration = end_year - start_year; overlapping period names (Three Kingdoms 220-280, Sixteen Kingdoms 304-439) are kept as concurrent rows because they label political periods, not single regimes.
• Lunar civil dates need conversion to the proleptic Gregorian calendar before plotting; the 闰月 intercalary leap month every ~32-33 months shifts the civil year by one month relative to the solar year.
• The data set is a static frozen array filtered by a search predicate in O(n); there is no remote chronology service, so the page works offline once cached.