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.
History of the Han dynasty
Government policies were influenced by the proto-Daoist Huang-Lao (黃老) ideology, a mix of political and cosmological precepts given patronage by Wen's wife Empress Dou (d. 135 BCE), who was empress dowager during Jing's reign and grand empress dowager during the early reign of his successor Emperor Wu (r. 141–87 BCE). Huang-Lao, named after the mythical Yellow Emperor and the 6th-century-BCE philosopher Laozi, viewed the former as the founder of ordered civilization; this was unlike the Confucians, who gave that role to legendary sage kings Yao and Shun. Han imperial patrons of Huang-Lao sponsored the policy of "nonaction" or wuwei (無為) (a central concept of Laozi's "Daodejing"), which claimed that rulers should interfere as little as possible if administrative and legal systems were to function smoothly. The influence of Huang-Lao doctrines on state affairs became eclipsed with the formal adoption of Confucianism as state ideology during Wu's reign and the later view that Laozi, not the Yellow Emperor, was the originator of Daoist practices.