Late-Han Population Collapse / 东汉末年人口崩塌

Late-Han population collapse / 东汉末年人口崩塌 is the source-scoped demographic frame Hanji 898 builds from late Eastern Han registration numbers. The episode compares a 157 CE official population figure above fifty-six million with a circa-220 official registry of 7.67 million, then uses a near-forty-eight-million gap to frame war, natural disaster, epidemic, and social disorder as compounding pressures.

The concept should not be used as a precise mortality calculation by itself. The episode’s value is interpretive: huge registry decline can reflect death, displacement, household-registration collapse, unregistered populations, and lost state capacity at the same time. It links the epidemic notices of Pandemic As Historical Force to the wider political and military breakdown captured by War-Disaster Compounding.

Key Claims

• Registry counts are political and administrative records, not a simple census of everyone alive under unstable conditions.
• The late-Han population gap should be treated as evidence of institutional and social collapse as well as human death.
• Epidemic is one driver in a larger disorder field, alongside war, natural hazards, famine, displacement, and lost administrative reach.
• The source does not assign exact causal shares among war, disease, disaster, rebellion, and registration failure.
• The frame helps explain why public-health distress, frontier pressure, and court incapacity appear together in the late-Han run.

Connections

• Hanji 898 - source episode.
• 汉灵帝 - reign context for repeated epidemic and disaster notices.
• Pandemic As Historical Force, War-Disaster Compounding, Natural Hazard As Social Disaster, and Disaster Response State Capacity - disease, war, disaster, and relief-capacity frames.
• 鲜卑 and 并州 - frontier pressure visible in the same source field.