Chinese emperors family tree (early)
Emperor Xian, the last emperor of the Han dynasty, was a descendant of the first emperor Liu Bang. Lasting for over 400 years (the first to last for more than a century), the Han Dynasty is regarded as one of the golden ages of Chinese history. The Han Dynasty was interrupted by the reign of the usurper Wang Mang, who declared the Xin dynasty (9–23 AD); on this basis, the Han Dynasty is generally divided into the Western Han (206 BC – 9 AD and 23–25 AD) and the Eastern Han (25–220 AD). The rulers of the Shu Han, one of the three successor states to the Han Dynasty during the Three Kingdoms period, were descended from the Han imperial family, and considered themselves a continuation of the Han Dynasty; they are included below.
Wufang Shangdi
The ritual system of the early emperors of the Han dynasty (206 BCE–220 AD) was not different from that of the Qin, with the only change consisting in the integration of the Black Deity by Gaozu or Liu Bang (206–195), the first emperor of the dynasty. However, Han state religion soon found itself divided between two factions. On one hand there were the Confucians who pushed for a new ritual system and a religio-political centralisation around the worship of the God of Heaven by the emperor, the God of Heaven's son, and the worship of lesser deities who had to be approved by the Confucians themselves, who considered themselves the only ones capable of interpreting the signs of Heaven in accordance with the classics. On the other hand there were the "fangshi" (方士 "masters of directions"), ritual masters who formulated what would have been called the "Huang–Lao" proto-Taoist religious movement, who presented themselves as the continuators of the traditions of the erstwhile kingdoms, and who emphasised the worship of local deities integrated into a theology in which the supreme God of Heaven was named "Taiyi" ("Great One"), and its human manifestation was the ancestral Yellow Emperor whom the emperors had to imitate.