王莽

Wang Mang is the only ruler of the Xin, and the reason this collection has a one-empress dynasty. A nephew of the empress dowager, he rose through the consort family to regent, installed an infant emperor, and in 9 AD took the throne himself — then tried to remake the empire along the lines of a golden age he read about in the classics.

The reforms were not cynical, which is part of why they failed. He nationalised land and forbade its sale, abolished private slaveholding, reissued the currency several times over, and set state monopolies on iron, salt and wine. Each measure had a classical warrant and no working administration behind it, and the people who had to carry them out were the landowners they were aimed at.

Then the Yellow River changed course. The floods and the famine that followed produced the Red Eyebrows, and by 23 AD a Han restorationist army was in Chang'an. Wang Mang was killed in the palace; his head was kept by later dynasties as a curiosity for nearly three centuries.

His empress — Xiang Li's single Xin painting — is the woman who was married to him before any of this and who died in 21 AD, having lost her sons to their father's politics. His daughter, married off to the last emperor of the Western Han, refused to be treated as a Xin princess and died in the fire at the fall of the capital.