How long did liu bang rule

Under his reign, Confucian ideas slowly sidelined legalist ideas for good. He also devoted himself into subduing other unruly kings within the neighborhood. He soon annexed them all, appointing his sons and relatives as princes of these subjugated kingdoms, thereby consolidating all the powers of his new empire. Liu Bang was mortally wounded during his Ying Bu rebellion campaign with a stray arrow. He fell ill, and saw that his health is slowly failing him.

He refused treatment until the very end. The Emperor Hui of Han succeeded him. And , how do you think this rumor was spread? The emperors scribes spreading the word and writing it on tablets, making the people believe that the emperor was a great man when he was merely a peasant. Your email address will not be published. Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment. Art History U.

History World History. December 7, at pm. Breaunna says:. August 22, at pm. Lok Si says:. He showed particular concern for reviving the rural economy and for lightening the tax burden on the peasants. Though generally humane in civil matters , he dealt harshly with those who threatened his reign from within China. He tried to win the support of the common people by treating them less harshly than the Qin rulers before him. He allowed other leaders to have kingdoms in the eastern part of the empire, and they spread over most of the territory of the empire.

The imperial court had direct power over the western third of the empire. Liu Bang inherited a large empire and the foundation of imperial rule laid by the Qin court.

He utilized a standardized written language for the whole empire that had been promulgated by the previous system. Liu Bang also inherited the military technology and tactics that had enabled the Qin Dynasty to form their empire. He laid great emphasis on Confucianism. In his early days, he disliked reading and scorned Confucianism.

After becoming the emperor, he still held the same attitudes towards Confucianism but his favorite Confucian teacher convinced him of the need for the philosophy, which he then accepted and promoted.

He prepared a banquet and invited all his old friends and townsfolk to join him. Liu Bang was often thought to have the semblance of a dragon. The dragon is an important symbol in China. In the Chinese zodiac, it symbolizes power, nobility, honor, luck, and success. As founder of the Han dynasty, Liu Bang also became the symbolic father of the Han people. As with many dynastic founders, it is difficult to separate the truth about Liu Bang—or the Emperor Gaozu of Han, as he came to be known—from the legendary tales about his life and character that proliferated in posthumous histories of his reign.

This process of myth-making was initiated by Liu Bang himself upon his ascension to the Dragon Throne. Thus few details about his life before becoming emperor exist. Whereas his great rival for the throne, Xiang Yu , hailed from an ancient family of patrician military leaders, Liu was an unknown. He was born in a small village in the present-day Jiangsu province on the eastern coast of China. Jiangsu province is a watery coastal region, famed for its canals since ancient times.

This photograph of the historic town of Zhouzhuang is via Wikimedia Commons. They were farmers, working the rice paddies that stretched out from the Yellow River northward over the low swamplands of Jiangsu. In his late twenties, however, Liu improved his condition by passing the civil service exam—high marks on government tests were a powerful engine of upward mobility in China, then and today— and he became a minor provincial official.

By his forties, Liu seems to have become a popular local political figure, noted for his magnanimous nature. But he was not a particularly powerful man. There were thousands like him, local magistrates whose tax-collecting and governance allowed the first emperor of China, Qin Shi Huangdi, to sustain his rule. The famed terracotta soldiers at the mausoleum of Qin Shi Huangdi, discovered by local farmers in Image via Wikimedia Commons.

Liu was charged with escorting a group of prisoners to the mausoleum, where they would toil at its construction. The story of how Liu gained the throne is incredibly complex, and involves a series of double-dealings between the peasant leader and the man who was widely predicted to become the next emperor, the young nobleman and general Xiang Yu. Despite their vastly different upbringings, the two men had much in common: both scorned books, learning and historical precedent, and both were wildly ambitious.