- acupuncture: Therapy contributed to medicine from the Chinese
- Analects: Collection of the ideas and teachings of Confucius
- animism: belief that spirits inhabit everything
- autocracy: The emperor has total power
- bureacracy: A government organized into different levels and tasks
- calligraphy: Characters used for writing
- Cheng: Ruler who found the Qin dynasty
- civil service: Runs the day-to-day business of a government
- Confucius: Leading philosopher
- Dao De Jing: Compilation of Laozi's teachings on Daoism
- dialects: Variations of the Chinese language
- dikes: Walls built by early farmers along the Huang to protect their crops
- Five Classics: Texts used to train scholars and civil servants in ancient China
- genealogy: Record of ancestors in a family tree
- Great Wall of China: Wall built and expanded upon by early rulers to protect from invasions
- Han: Dynasty of rulers that ruled a centralized and growing empire
- Laozi: Founder of the philosophy called Daoism
- Legalism: School of Chinese philosophy concerned with polotics
- leveling: Economic policy where the government used price controls to balance the economic effects of farm surpluses or shortages
- Liu Bang: A commoner who became a Qin general and overthrew the empire, then founded the Han dynasty
- Liu Ch'e: The longest-ruling han emperor who helped Han rule over a larger area than the Roman EMpire
- loess: Yellow soil in the Huang River Valley
- oracle bones: Shoulder bones of a cattle or tortoise shells that priests wrote questions on
- Qin: Created the first true empire of China
- Shang: Established the first dynasty in China
- Silk Road: Trade route stretching from China to the mediterranean
- Xia: A line of kings created by Yu, a mythological figure
- yang: Male force of the Chinese belief that everything in the world results from a balance between two forces;Bright, active
- yin: Female force of the Chinese belief that everything in the world results from a balance between two forces;Dark, passive
- Zhou: Overthrew the Shang dynasty