12．Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty(Part One)

Liu Che (刘彻，157 B.C. —87 B.C.), Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty(汉武帝)came to the throne at the age of 16 but did not take whole control of the government until 131 B.C. Emperor Wu's reign lasted 54 years, one of the longest in China. During his reign, Emperor Wu made a lot of achievements to the nation and was one of the greatest emperors in Chinese history.

He made use of imperial power to a greater extent than any former emperors in the Han Dynasty and developed a strong and centralized state. In order to realize this goal, Emperor Wu reorganized his government and promoted Confucianism. Soon after he came into power, he banished the students of other philosophies from the government and granted exclusive recognition of Confucianism as the national philosophy. Since then, for over 2,000 years, if a man wanted to become an official, he had to study Confucian classics.