Why is Han used to talk about the people we know as the Chinese? What can we learn about the Han by understanding the origins and evolution of this name? This paper explores these questions through an investigation of the history of the term Han and how it came to be applied to the people of the Central Plains. It argues that the development of Han as an ethnonym owed greatly to the intervention of the Hu, the nomadic and semi-nomadic peoples living to the north of the Central Plains. This process began as early as the 6th century CE but stabilized only in the 15th c., after the founding of the Ming dynasty. That the meaning of Han remained unstable for such a long time suggests that the ethnic unity of the Chinese, as projected in the adoption of the name Han to describe themselves, is more the product of repeated efforts to create and foster political unity than it is, as is often supposed, the source of that unity.
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