The Han's great-grandmother and the Wang family's own root. She held the transmission seal, threw it down at her nephew's man, and told his brothers they would be clan-exterminated.
I am the Han's old widow, and I die this morning or tonight. I mean to be buried with this seal. You will not get it.Her answer when her nephew's brother came to ask for the Han's transmission seal — Hanshu, juan 98, Biography of the Empress Dowager Yuan
Appears in
Relations
- Wang Mang rivals — She was his aunt and the root of his house's power, and she out-vetoed him twice; the accession he made from her family's standing needed her seal and could not get it, until she threw it on the floor. She died in 13 CE and he wore three years of mourning for her.
- Liu Xin colleagues — The scholars of her court wrote the ceremony that put her nephew on the throne, and the mandate text a subordinate produced asked that she be styled the Ritual Mother of the New House; the characters, the examination reported, were neither carved nor painted but had grown so by their own nature.
Myth vs record
The Empress Dowager Wang was a passive old woman who happened to be the aunt of the man who took the empire, and history blames her for nothing.
She is the one person in the record who said no to him and was never overruled by argument. She had already out-vetoed him twice while he was regent; she refused the seal on the ground that a new dynasty should cut its own and hand it down for ten thousand generations, and that she would not use an unlucky seal from a state that had lost the mandate; and the book keeps the room — the women of the bedchamber all crying — and her nephew's brother's weary answer that finished it. Ban Gu, who is not sympathetic to her family, explains Wang Mang's rise as her inherited position plus the Han's middling fortune, three breaks in the succession, and an empress-dowager who lived long enough to be her own family's head. She was buried alongside Emperor Yuan with a ditch cut between their graves: joined and separated at once.