It only took Qin 10 years to conquer all of China. The Qin king thought he was even better than gods (like the ones we skipped in part 1), so he invented the word “emperor” and called himself that. He confiscated weapons and reforged them into something more useful, like… 12 metal men. He also standardized all the things: money, letters, colors, numbers, distance between car wheels, and the speed of broadband internet. You know, all the things. He constructed the Great Wall. He burned a bunch of books and killed a bunch of scholars. Then he died. Which also took 10 years.
Zhao Gao, a eunuch with a Jobsian reality distortion field, didn’t like the crown prince. So he altered the will, got the crown prince to kill himself, then pushed a different, idiot prince to be the next emperor. Welp, instant karma time. The Qin dynasty lasted barely 15 years before it collapsed. It was brought down by two people, Xiang Yu and Liu Bang.
Xiang Yu was someone who rolled 18 for Strength and 0 for Charisma. And his hobby was cooking people. He was so good at warfare that he kept fighting, kept winning, and kept losing friends and land at the same time. In his final battle, he led 800 cavalry and broke through an encirclement of 300,000 men, then with just 28 men fought off 10,000 pursuers and killed their commander. And finally he solo’d a few hundred enemy soldiers, until he saw someone and said, hey, I know you, you’re from my hometown. I’m tired of killing, so I’m letting you kill me and claim the credit.
Liu Bang’s skin was so thick that Xiang Yu’s sword couldn’t even pierce it. When Xiang Yu threatened to cook Liu Bang’s dad, Liu Bang said, cool, I’d like to taste a bowl of Dad soup too. One time when he was running away, he kicked his children off the cart to reduce the weight. The driver picked the children up, then he kicked them off again. Then the driver picked the children up again, then he kicked them off again. But he also believed sharing is caring, so four people helped him conquer the world: one was a good general, one was a good strategist, one could conjure troops out of thin air… and his wife.
Anyway, Liu Bang became the emperor of the next dynasty, the Han dynasty. Know what you do first after becoming emperor? You kill the people who helped you get there. So Liu Bang basically spent his time as emperor doing just that. Then he died after a few years. After he died, his wife kept running the empire for him and killing people for him. Then his wife died too. Oh no, now who do you pick as the next emperor? After a brainstorming session, the ministers decided on Liu Heng, a prince with zero presence.
Turns out this prince with zero presence was actually a great emperor. First he took back his power bit by bit, then abolished cruel punishments, then cut the tax rate in half (there was even a 13-year stretch where the tax rate was 0%). The tax cuts were meant for the commoners, because back then, there were no big companies or trickle-down economics. His son was not as good as him, but basically continued doing the same things. Despite the low tax rate, the Han dynasty became so rich that the strings holding the coins together in their national bank had rotted. Strange, huh.
Then the war-obsessed Liu Che became emperor at age 15. He invaded the Xiongnu in the north, Nanyue in the south, Xinjiang in the west, and Korea in the east. The Han dynasty went to war so much that he blew through everything his grandpa and dad had saved up. And finally, on his deathbed, he admitted he was wrong. He’s a polarizing figure.
When Liu Che died, he appointed a regent to look after the empire because his son was too young. The young emperor died at age 20, so the regent went shopping for a replacement. He ordered a prince to become the next emperor, but the prince was so erratic that he did 1,127 (!) stupid things in a span of 27 days. (Which was like 41 per day.) The regent then returned the prince and gave him a one-star review. Fortunately this was within the 30-day window.
Then someone told the regent, hey I found this commoner, Liu Bingyi. I don’t know why he’s a commoner, but he seems to be related to the emperor. And the regent thought, anyone but the last guy, and accepted. Liu Bingyi turned out to be a capable emperor, and under his reign the Han dynasty finally recovered from the wars of decades before.
Unfortunately, the quality of the next few emperors got worse. The next emperor was weak. The one after that was a notorious womanizer. The third wanted to make his gay lover the emperor. The fourth died young. It was 6 BC. Jesus Christ was about to be born, and Wang Mang was about to usurp the throne.