A five-year-old's boast about a golden house helped make him emperor
Asked at a royal gathering whether he would like to marry his older cousin, the five-year-old prince Liu Che reportedly promised to build her a house of gold. His aunt treated the answer as a sign from heaven, the match was made, and the alliance helped carry him to the throne as Emperor Wu of Han.
Liu Che was born in 156 BC on the very day his father became Emperor Jing, and his mother claimed to have dreamed of the sun falling into her womb. He was far from first in line. The crown prince was an elder half-brother whose mother, Lady Li, managed to offend nearly everyone, including the emperor's influential sister, Princess Guantao, by rejecting her daughter as a bride. The princess turned instead to Liu Che's mother, Consort Wang, and the golden-house story, recorded in a later collection of tales, gave Chinese the idiom about keeping a beloved in a golden house.
The princess then worked on her brother, and Consort Wang set a final trap: she had a minister urge that Lady Li be made empress. The emperor, convinced of a conspiracy, deposed the crown prince in 150 BC. Consort Wang became empress, and her seven-year-old son was named heir in 149 BC. He took the throne at 15 in 141 BC.
His reign lasted 54 years, a record among ethnic Han emperors. He abandoned the hands-off approach of earlier Han rulers, which had let vassal states grow unruly, and built a strong central state. He made Confucianism the official philosophy and founded a school to train administrators in its classics, while trusted advisers drew on tougher Legalist ideas. His armies pushed back the raiding Xiongnu, and borders stretched from the Fergana Valley to northern Korea and northern Vietnam.
In 139 BC he sent the envoy Zhang Qian west seeking allies, opening contacts across Central Asia. At home he started the custom of periodically renaming reign eras, and in 104 BC adopted the Taichu calendar, developed with input from the historian Sima Qian, which fixed the first month as the start of the Chinese year ever since.
Source: Emperor Wu of Han
