The Han Dynasty

The Qin Dynasty collapsed the way an overloaded bridge collapses: all at once. When Qin Shi Huang died in 210 BCE, his empire was barely a decade old and already despised. Forced labor. Brutal punishments. Book burnings. The First Emperor had unified China by sheer force, and without him the system had no center of gravity. Within four years, the countryside was on fire.

Out of that chaos rose one of the least likely empire-builders in history. Liu Bang was not an aristocrat, not a general, not a scholar. He was a minor provincial official, a village headman from Pei county who drank too much and cracked jokes. When a group of convicts he was escorting to a construction site began deserting, Liu Bang released the rest and went into hiding as an outlaw. Not an auspicious start.

But Liu Bang had something the Qin emperors lacked entirely: the ability to listen. He surrounded himself with talented advisors, rewarded loyalty, delegated freely, and possessed an instinct for knowing when to fight and when to wait. After years of civil war against the aristocratic warlord Xiang Yu — a far more dashing and militarily gifted figure — Liu Bang prevailed and in 202 BCE declared the founding of the Han Dynasty. He took the title Emperor Gaozu.