Liu Bang, who would come to rule as Emperor Gaozu of Han, stands out in Chinese history as one of the rare dynastic founders to have clawed his way up from genuinely humble origins. While most emperors could point to aristocratic blood or military pedigree, Liu Bang started life as a peasant, making his eventual ascent to the throne something close to extraordinary.
The imperial mythology that grew up around his reign conveniently traced his lineage back to the legendary Emperor Yao and the Yellow Emperor, a genealogical claim that noble families of the era routinely deployed to legitimize their ambitions. His birth also attracted its own supernatural folklore: his mother, Liu Ao, was said to have conceived him after a chance encounter with a jiaolong, a mythical dragon-like creature, during a storm, the kind of origin story dynasties tended to cultivate rather than question.
As a young man, Liu Bang was loud, magnetic, and big-hearted, though not exactly industrious. He had little appetite for book learning or steady work, and his own father reportedly dismissed him as a good-for-nothing. He drifted into petty lawlessness, leaned on his brother for basic support, and eventually fell in with Zhang Er, a former retainer of the Lord of Wei. Two officials at the county government, Xiao He and Cao Shen, regularly helped him dodge the consequences of his behavior and ultimately secured him a minor posting as local sheriff.
A pivotal moment came when Liu Bang traveled to the Qin capital of Xianyang on corvée duty and caught sight of Qin Shi Huang’s imperial procession rolling through the streets. The spectacle apparently lodged something in him. Around this same period, he managed to marry Lü Zhi, whose wealthy father, Lü Wen, took a shine to him at a banquet where Liu had boldly announced a fake gift of ten thousand coins, bluffing his way into respectable company.
His outlaw career began when he was assigned to escort a group of convict laborers to the construction site of Qin Shi Huang’s mausoleum. When prisoners began escaping along the route, he calculated that the punishment for losing them would be death regardless of the final count, so he freed the rest himself and fled with a band of willing followers to Mount Mangdang. There, according to legend, a drunken Liu Bang killed a great white serpent blocking his path. The following day, an old woman was found weeping over the dead creature, claiming it was the son of the White Emperor, cut down by the son of the Red Emperor. Whether anyone believed it at the time, the story would later serve him well.
When rebellion against Qin broke out across the country, Liu Bang rose quickly. The people of Pei killed their own magistrate and accepted him as their new leader after he shot a written appeal over the city walls, and from that point he was known as the Duke of Pei. By 207 BC, he had beaten his great rival Xiang Yu in a race to enter Xianyang, and the last Qin emperor, Ziying, handed over his surrender without a fight. Liu Bang’s occupation was notably restrained: he banned looting and dismantled the most brutal Qin legal codes, earning him genuine goodwill among the local population.
His relationship with Xiang Yu was never going to hold. At the notorious Feast at Swan Goose Gate, Xiang Yu arranged for a sword dance intended to serve as cover for Liu Bang’s assassination, but Xiang Yu’s own uncle, Xiang Bo, threw himself in the way of each strike. Liu Bang slipped out under the pretense of visiting the latrine and did not return.
Xiang Yu eventually packed him off to the remote kingdom of Bashu, a parting gesture meant to neutralize him. Liu Bang burned the gallery roads behind him as he entered, projecting the image of a man who had given up. He had not. Following the counsel of the strategist Han Xin, he sent a conspicuous force to repair one of the roads as a distraction, while his main army slipped through Chencang on an entirely different route and overran the Three Qins before Zhang Han could mount a real defense.
The war against Xiang Yu was long and punishing. At the Battle of Pengcheng, Liu Bang lost more than 100,000 men, thousands of them drowned in the river during the rout. Fleeing with his children in his carriage, he shoved them out at least three times to lighten the load; each time, his driver Xiahou Ying stopped the carriage and put them back in. The war finally turned at Gaixia, where Han Xin had his soldiers sing songs from the Chu heartland at night. The sound of their own regional music drifting through the dark broke the spirit of Xiang Yu’s troops, and they deserted in great numbers. Xiang Yu, surrounded and abandoned, took his own life.
Liu Bang was proclaimed emperor in 202 BC. He established his capital first at Luoyang before a soldier named Lou Jing persuaded him that the more defensible Guanzhong region made better strategic sense, and he relocated to Chang’an. His early policies as emperor reflected his instinct for pragmatism over ideology: land taxes were dropped to one fifteenth of yield, people who had sold themselves into bondage during the wars were freed, and coin minting was opened up.
His attitude toward Confucianism was famously contemptuous at first. But a scholar named Lu Jia eventually wore him down with a book making the case that moral governance outlasted government by brute force, and Liu Bang found himself persuaded. Confucian thought spread through his court, and in 195 BC he paused at Confucius’s birthplace to perform a ritual in the philosopher’s honor, a gesture that would have seemed laughable from the rascal on Mount Mangdang.
At the end of his life, he pushed to have his heir, Liu Ying, replaced by his favored younger son, Liu Ruyi. He dropped the effort after discovering that the Four Whiteheads of Mount Shang, four reclusive scholars he had long tried and failed to recruit to his service, had thrown their quiet support behind Liu Ying. If even they could not be moved, Liu Bang apparently decided, neither could the succession.