After the demise of the Qin Dynasty, Liu Bang and Xiang Yu fought another five years of Chu-Han War. In 202 BC, Liu Bang won, and the following year he officially proclaimed himself emperor, laying the foundation for the 400-year rule of the Han Empire.
The Han Dynasty was divided into two stages: the Western Han Dynasty and the Eastern Han Dynasty. The Western Han Dynasty lasted 2 14 years, and was destroyed by Wang Mang's usurpation of political power in 8 AD. However, after 15, the rebels wiped out Wang Mang's new dynasty. In AD 25, Liu Xiudeng rebuilt the Han Dynasty, known as the Eastern Han Dynasty. At the end of the Eastern Han Dynasty 196, Cao Pi, son of the powerful minister Cao Cao, usurped the throne and died. The rule of the Han Dynasty lasted for more than 400 years, and the economic prosperity created the first golden age in the history of China, and the royal family named Liu also multiplied into an unprecedented royal blood group in the history of China. Later, some people thought that the number of descendants of Zhu Yuanzhang was once comparable to others. However, after Zhu Yuanzhang was slaughtered, he still could not be compared with the descendants of Liu's royal family.
Looking back on the history of China for thousands of years, it can be said that the royal family named Liu in the Han Dynasty developed and multiplied the most among the royal families in previous dynasties. This is because most of the royal families in the Han Dynasty were banned and it took a long time to spread to China. Liu Bang, the founding emperor of the Han Dynasty, had eight sons. He learned his lesson. The Qin dynasty did not enfeoffment the royal family, but it was all destroyed in the end. He made Liu's descendants king of the whole country. These vassals, who were sealed to various places, took concubines widely, and their descendants were in groups. By the fourth generation of the Western Han Dynasty, there were hundreds of cousins of Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty. This development according to the geometric cardinal number will grow to an amazing number after only a few generations.
During the Han Dynasty, there were 18 generations of royalty. Because some of them are brothers and sisters, there are 28 emperors. During the Western Han Dynasty (2 14), after nine generations, the royal family counted by the imperial court grew to 80,000.
There were many royal families in the Han Dynasty, but the financial burden of the imperial court was not too heavy. Although the system of Han Dynasty was formulated by governors, it has not been inherited since Liang Wudi's time. Had to be demoted from generation to generation, and the property was divided equally among the sons. For example, the previous generation was king, and the next generation was reduced to Hou. According to this implementation, the result is no more than three or four generations, and most of the descendants of princes become civilians, and the court has no special care for most people. For example, after the overthrow of the Western Han Dynasty, the Red Eyebrow Army hired 15-year-old Liu Huang family Liu Penzi as a puppet emperor. The little boy became a shepherd boy herding sheep.
At the end of the Western Han Dynasty, Wang Mang, the imperial concubine, seized the imperial power. In 8 AD, she tore off her last disguise, overthrew the Han Dynasty as emperor and changed her name to "Xin". After Wang Mang ascended the throne, he pursued chaotic internal and external policies. Only six years later, the Greenwood Uprising broke out, and many Liu royal families from all over the country joined the rebel army. After nine years of war, the rebels invaded Chang 'an and killed Wang Mang, and the Liu royal family regained power.
Some careerists in later generations thought that the key to the re-establishment of the Eastern Han Dynasty was Wang 15 years after the demise of the Western Han Dynasty. Be soft-hearted, Liu's royal family has not been eliminated. In fact, before usurping power, Wang Mang had poisoned the fourteen-year-old emperor Han Ping, who was his little son-in-law. As a result, his daughter was widowed in her teens and ruthless. However, many years before this man usurped power, he had been flaunting "benevolence and righteousness" to the world. When he first became king, the regime was unstable, and he bribed some down-and-out royalty to call Liu and advised him to move forward. Naturally, it is not easy to kill the original royal family.
After Emperor Ping was poisoned, Wang Mang established a two-year-old little emperor, Liu Ying, who
Wang Mang thinks that the country is the master and underestimates the social energy of the Liu royal family. At the end of the Western Han Dynasty, the emperors of the Liu family really let everyone down. Wang Mang thinks that he can buy people's hearts by pretending to be just and taking a firm stand, and then transfer contradictions through the war against the northern minorities. Unexpectedly, Wang Mang's New Deal intensified social contradictions, and foreign wars aroused people's antipathy. Most people remember the days when the Liu Dynasty was relatively stable. As a result, a great uprising broke out less than six years after the establishment of Wang Mang's new dynasty.
Because people in society generally have orthodox ideas, most of the troops who rose up against Wang Mang supported the Liu royal family as the nominal leader. For example, the Green Forest Uprising Army held the Henan Mountain Royal Family as the emperor to turn over a new leaf, and the Red Eyebrow Uprising Army drew lots to select a 15-year-old Liu Pengzi as the emperor. Emperor Liu, supported by the Red Eyebrow Army in Qinglin, is actually a puppet and a straw bag. Legend has it that when Liu Xuan was enthroned by a chivalrous man, his hands trembled with shame and he was too nervous to say a word. After the outlaws defeated Wang Mang in Chang 'an, Liu Xuan ignored the state affairs and indulged in womanizing. He is often too drunk to appear in court. He often lets the waiter pretend to be himself and sit in the curtain to discuss with the minister of civil and military affairs. When the minister recognized that it wasn't Liu Xuan's voice, he was even more dissatisfied, and his subordinates soon deserted. As a result, the chivalrous man was quickly wiped out by the Red Eyebrow Army, and Liu Xuan himself was strangled.
In the uprising against Wang Mang, many members of the Liu royal family took an active part in the uprising. Of course, this is because they hate Wang for taking Liu's country. Another important reason is that there are too many descendants of Liu Bang and they are scattered all over the world. Rebels everywhere are willing to use them as flags or puppets. The truly talented royal family who participated in the uprising at that time should be Liu Xiu of Nanyang.
Liu Xiu, the founder of the Eastern Han Dynasty, is said to be the king of Changsha. As a teenager, his family was no different from ordinary people. After Wang Mang usurped the Han Dynasty to establish a "new dynasty", Liu Xiu lived a life of farming, reading and making friends in the countryside, tempered his will and strengthened his ambition to restore the Han Dynasty. In 22 AD, Brother He organized an armed force with Liu Zongshi's children as the backbone in his hometown to respond to outlaws. In 23 AD, Liu Xiu led an army of 3,000 men to attack Kunyang in the north. With his extraordinary military ability, he defeated 400,000 of Wang Mang's main force in one fell swoop, creating a war example in the world military history, namely the famous "Kunyang Victory" in the history of China.
The Battle of Kunyang became a turning point in the history of the Han Dynasty, laying the groundwork for the demise of Wang Mang's new dynasty, and Liu Xiu became famous from then on. Because it was difficult to accommodate the fugitives, Liu Xiu went to Hebei to develop, and incorporated the local bronze horse army and other armed forces. In 25 AD, he proclaimed himself emperor and made Luoyang his capital. It took him eleven years to destroy the separatist forces in China and finally unify the whole world.
The war with Wang Mang swept across the country, killing more than half, and Liu's royal family also died a lot. After Liu Xiu rebuilt the Eastern Han Dynasty, due to the war some time ago, the identification statistics of the royal family were chaotic. The imperial court only gave preferential treatment to Liu Xiu's own descendants-the royal family, and did not make more detailed statistics on all Liu Bang's descendants. However, it is inferred that by the end of the Eastern Han Dynasty, Liu Bang's descendants had grown to at least several hundred thousand.