The Imperial Palace welcomed a new mistress, Zhao Feiyan, an entertainer and dancing girl who had transformed herself into the Empress of the Great Han.
Her story had quite a legendary quality, and people throughout All Under Heaven vied to discuss it. In an age when notions of family pedigree were not yet especially strong, Zhao Feiyan's success set a powerful example.
The emperor indulged in wine and women, exhausting his body early in life. Then he encountered an incomparable enchantress like Zhao Feiyan and began taking elixirs like a madman. After an ordinary bout of chills, he took a wonder drug from a practitioner of the occult, only to fall bedridden and die on his sickbed.
The ministers were rather indifferent to the emperor's death, and the common people only let out a few dry wails because the rites required it.
Among the generally short-lived emperors of the Han Dynasty, Liu Chi's reign had already been a very long one.
For an emperor like Liu Chi, the contribution his death made to All Under Heaven was greater than the achievements of his entire life.
The ministers followed the prescribed procedures and gave Liu Chi the middling posthumous title Xi: no great achievements, no great faults.
The process of burying Liu Chi in the Imperial Mausoleum began proceeding step by step, but the court's attention was no longer on this. It was on the future emperor.
Zhao Feiyan had no sons, but Emperor Xi had children.
They were simply all very young. Zhao Feiyan, who had risen to become Empress Dowager at such a young age, selected a two-year-old Imperial Prince whose birth mother had died in childbirth and, in her capacity as Empress Dowager, brought him to the Imperial Throne.
From then on, he would be her son.
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