汉光武帝

A ninth-generation descendant of Gaozu, farming in Nanyang when the Xin collapsed. He won the civil war that followed, refounded the Han with its capital at Luoyang, and spent thirty years rebuilding an administration that had been destroyed twice in twenty years.

The restoration was deliberately unheroic: he demobilised his own generals with titles and estates rather than commands, freed slaves by decree several times over, and refused to be drawn back into the Xiongnu wars.

Both of his empresses are on one silk. Yin Lihua was the woman he wanted and could not afford to marry when he needed an alliance; Guo Shengtong was the alliance. He made Guo empress, deposed her seventeen years later, and finally gave the rank to Yin — an unusually humane version of a story that normally ends in a prison.