汉文帝

Chosen by the ministers who destroyed the Lü clan precisely because his mother's family was weak. He turned out to be the model Han ruler: taxes cut to a thirtieth and then suspended altogether, mutilating punishments abolished, and a court that spent almost nothing on itself.

The reign of Wen and his son Jing is remembered as the Rule of Wen and Jing, the period when the treasury filled and the granaries overflowed — the reserve that paid for his grandson's wars. He refused to build a terrace because it would cost as much as ten households owned.

Empress Dou came to him by an administrative error, sent to the wrong prince as a palace maid. She outlived him by decades, held the court to the Daoist teaching she believed in against a rising Confucian tide, and was the most powerful person in the empire until she died in 135 BC.