Emperor of China

Huangdi (, "Emperor") or Emperor of China was the superlative title held by monarchs of China who ruled various imperial dynasties in Chinese history. In traditional Chinese political theory, the emperor of China was considered the Son of Heaven and the autocrat of all under Heaven worshipped posthumously under an Imperial cult. Under the Han dynasty, Confucianism gained sanction as the official political theory and succession in most cases theoretically followed agnatic primogeniture. The lineage of emperors descended from a paternal family line constituted a dynasty. The absolute authority of the emperor came with a variety of governing duties and moral obligations; failure to uphold these was thought to remove the dynasty's Mandate of Heaven and to justify its overthrow. In practice, emperors sometimes avoided the strict rules of succession and dynasties' purported "failures" were detailed in official histories written by their successful replacements or even later dynasties. The power of the emperor was also limited by the imperial bureaucracy, which was staffed by scholar-officials and in some dynasties eunuchs. An emperor was also constrained by filial obligations to his ancestors' policies and dynastic traditions, such as those first detailed in the Ming dynasty's Ancestral Instructions. Origin and history During the Western Zhou period ( – 771 BC), Chinese vassal rulers with power over their particular fiefdoms served a strong central monarch. Following a brutal succession crisis and relocation of the royal capital, the power of the Zhou kings (, mod. wang) waned, and during the Eastern Zhou period, the regional lords overshadowed the king and began to usurp that title for themselves. In 221 BCE, after the then-king of Qin completed the conquest of the various kingdoms of the Warring States period, he adopted a new title to reflect his prestige as a ruler greater than the rulers before him. He called himself Shi Huangdi, the First Emperor. Before this, Huang (, "august, sovereign") was most commonly seen as a reverential epithet for a deceased ancestor, and Di was an apical ancestor, originally referring to the deïfied ancestors of the Shang kings. In the 3rd century BCE, the two titles had not previously been used together. The Emperor of China, like the Zhou kings before him, and the Shang kings before them, was most commonly referred to as Tianzi (, the Son of Heaven), who was divinely appointed to rule.