Though vilified by deeply sexist Confucian historians after her reign, in more recent times her contributions have been widely recognized - in particular, her expansion of the civil service examination system to allow commoners to sit for examinations, thus providing a ladder for social mobility that hadn’t previously existed. Wu who wasn’t just an empress (she was, beginning in 655, empress to the Tang emperor) but actually ruled as emperor (huangdi) in a kind of male persona from 690 to 705 AD, and was the only woman in Chinese history to have actually held the title emperor (of a dynasty she called Zhou). He subdued the Turkic tribes north of the Great Wall and extended the Tang frontiers far into Central Asia. He inaugurated a long period of cosmopolitan splendor and military dominance. Often regarded as China’s greatest emperor technically the second emperor of Tang but really the power behind the throne even during his father’s reign. Sui parallels Qin in that it was a highly autocratic unifying dynasty that lasted a very short time but ushered in a long period of relative stability. ![]() His reign was followed by that of his son, Yangdi (Yáng Guǎng 杨广), but the dynasty ended after that. Suí Wéndì 隋文帝įounder of the Sui Dynasty that reunified China after the long Era of Division (the Six Dynasties and Sixteen Kingdoms) period, and built the Grand Canal. He had an extremely long reign of 54 years. Liu Che is the fifth emperor of Han, noted for having established Confucianism as the state’s ideology and for waging successful wars against the nomadic Xiongnu to the north and expanding the Han Dynasty’s territory westward all the way to the Pamirs, eastward into Korea, and southward to Vietnam. The dominant Chinese ethnicity still refers to itself as Han after the dynasty founded by Liu Bang. The dynasty lasted until 9 AD, and nominally continued after 25 AD (the Eastern Han Dynasty) and endured, in name, until 220 AD. This emperor who rose from humble peasant origins and defeated the Hegemon of Chu, Xiang Yu, to found the Han Dynasty in 206 BC. He is infamous for “burning the books and burying the scholars” in an effort to purge his court of Confucian influences. He is credited with having linked the “long walls” of the various Warring States into the first iteration of the Great Wall of standardizing weights and measures and the lengths of cart and chariot axles and of unifying the Chinese written language. ![]() The founding emperor of the Qin Dynasty who reunified China after centuries of division in the Spring & Autumn and Warring States period in 221 BC.
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