汉元帝

Devout, learned, and no administrator. He filled the government with classicists his father had deliberately kept out — Xuan warned him, in a famous line, that the Han ruled by a mix of law and virtue and not by the classics alone — and the eunuchs and consort families moved into the space.

It is his reign that sends Wang Zhaojun to the Xiongnu, one of the four beauties of Chinese legend, and his reign in which the first of the great affinal clans settles into the center of the state.

That clan was his empress's. Wang Zhengjun was chosen almost at random — the histories say for where she happened to be sitting — and went on to be empress or dowager across five reigns for sixty-one years. Her nephew was Wang Mang.