Emperor Yuan of Han
emperor of the Han dynasty
Emperor Yuan of Han, personal name Liu Shi (劉奭; 75 BC – 8 July 33 BC), was an emperor of the Chinese Han dynasty. He reigned from 48 BC to 33 BC. Emperor Yuan promoted Confucianism as the official creed of the Chinese government. He appointed adherents of Confucius to important government posts.
However, at the same time that he was solidifying Confucianism's position as the official ideology, the empire's condition slowly deteriorated due to his indecisiveness, his inability to stop factional infighting between officials in his administration, and the trust he held in certain corrupt officials. He was succeeded by Emperor Cheng.
Family background
When Emperor Yuan was born Liu Shi in 75 BC, his parents Liu Bingyi and Xu Pingjun were commoners without titles. Bingyi was a great-grandson of Emperor Wu, and his grandfather Liu Ju was Emperor Wu's crown prince, until Emperor Wu's paranoia forced him into a failed rebellion in 91 BC while Bingyi was still just an infant. The aftermath of the failed rebellion was that Prince Ju committed suicide and his entire family was executed. Bingyi was spared because of his young age, but became a commoner and survived on the largess of others. One of his supporters was chief eunuch Zhang He, who had been an advisor for Prince Ju before his rebellion, and who was punished by being castrated.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Emperor Yuan of Han” as emperor of the Han dynasty. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the history & society register because the source frames it as emperor of the Han dynasty. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Contemporary correspondence, administrative files and participant testimony can test how later narratives organized the event or institution. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 11, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7232. VIAF identifies the subject as 61461292. The Library of Congress control number is nr98031950. 1 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank.
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This entry incorporates text from “Emperor Yuan of Han” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.