202 BC – 220 AD

Han Dynasty

23 portrait chapters in the Chinese Empresses collection.

Empress Bo and Empress Wang Zhi

Empress Chen Jiao and Empress Wei Zifu

Empress Dou (Empress Xiaowen)

Empress Dou (Zhangde)

Empress Fu

Empress Guanglie (Yin Lihua) and Guo Shengtong

Empress Lü Zhi

“The First Woman in Power”

Empress Ma (Empress Mingde)

Empress Shangguan

“The Youngest Empress”

Empress Song and Empress Ling

Empress Xianmu (Cao Jie)

“The last empress of the Eastern Han dynasty of China”

Empress Xiao Hui (Zhang Yan)

“Depicted as cunning and ambitious”

Empress Xiaoping (Empress Wang)

Empress Xiaoyuan

“Commonly known as Grand Empress Dowager Wang (who lived to the age of 83)”

Empress Xu

Empress Yan Ji (Empress Ansi)

Empress Yin and Deng Sui (Empress Hexi)

Empress Yixian (Liang Nüying), Empress Deng (Deng Mengnü), Empress Huansi (Dou Miao)

Empress Zhao Feiyan

“From poverty to prominence”

Emperor Huan of Han

Emperor Ling of Han

Liang Na (Empress Shunlie)

Xu Pingjun, Huo Chengjun and Empress Wang Zhengjun

“Empresses of Emperor Xuan”

The era

Han Dynasty
Chinese Empresses

The Western Han (206 BCE – 9 CE) began when the peasant‑turned‑general Liu Bang seized power after the Qin collapse and set his capital in Chang’an. Relying on a revitalized bureaucracy infused with Confucian ideals, the dynasty expanded aggressively—most notably under Emperor Wu—into Central Asia, Korea, and Vietnam, opening the Silk Road and funding its ambitions through state monopolies on salt, iron, and liquor. Political stability and agricultural reforms spurred population growth, technological advances, and great works of scholarship such as Sima Qian’s Records of the Grand Historian. Mounting court intrigues, natural disasters, and economic strains eventually undercut imperial authority, allowing the usurper Wang Mang to interpose his brief Xin dynasty.

The Eastern Han (25 – 220 CE) emerged when Liu Xiu, a Han prince, overthrew Wang Mang and shifted the capital eastward to Luoyang, symbolically “re‑founding” the Han state. Early emperors restored trade and border security, while figures like Cai Lun and Zhang Heng advanced papermaking, astronomy, and engineering, and Buddhism took firmer root alongside Confucianism and Daoism. Yet power soon drifted to eunuchs, consort clans, and great landowners, squeezing the peasantry and igniting uprisings such as the Yellow Turban Rebellion. As regional warlords filled the vacuum—Cao Cao in the north, Liu Bei in the southwest, and Sun Quan in the southeast—the weakened court collapsed, giving way to the fractious Three Kingdoms era and ending four centuries of Han rule.