page_title: Chinese nobility
section_title: Sovereign and ruling family ranks
hierarchical_section_title: Chinese nobility / Sovereign and ruling family ranks
caption_attribution_description: English: An official photographic portrait of Empress Dowager Cixi (29 November 1835 – 15 November 1908), aged around 55 years. The photograph was coloured by Imperial Court painters according to reality.
context_page_description: The nobility of China was an important feature of the traditional social structure of Imperial China.
  While the concepts of hereditary sovereign and peerage titles and noble families were featured as early as the semi-mythical, early historical period, a settled system of nobility was established from the Zhou dynasty. In the subsequent millennia, this system was largely maintained in form, with some changes and additions, although the content constantly evolved. After the Song dynasty, most bureaucratic offices were filled though the imperial examination system, undermining the power of the hereditary aristocracy. The last, well-developed system of noble titles was established under the Qing dynasty.
  The Republican Revolution of 1911 ended the official imperial system. Though some noble families maintained their titles and dignity for a time, new political and economic circumstances forced their decline. Today, the nobility as a class has virtually disappeared.
context_section_description: The apex of the nobility is the sovereign. The title of the sovereign has changed over time, together with the connotations of the respective titles. In Chinese history are generally 3 levels of supreme and fully independent sovereignty or high, significantly autonomous sovereignty above the next lower category of ranks, the aristocracy who usually recognized the overlordship of a higher sovereign or ruled a semi-independent, tributary, or independent realm of self-recognized insufficient importance in size, power, or influence to claim a sovereign title, such as a Duchy which in Western terms would be called a Duchy, Principality, or some level of Chiefdom.
  The broadest sovereign is what gets translated as the single term emperor in English. An emperor might appoint or confirm or tolerate subsovereigns or tributary rulers styled kings.
  As a title of nobility, Ba Wang, hegemon, recognized overlordship of several subordinate kings while refraining from claiming the title of emperor within the imperium of the Chinese subcontinent, such as its borders were considered from era to era. Sovereigns holding the title of king of an individual state within and without the shifting borders of the Chinese imperium might be fully independent heads of foreign nations, such as the King of Korea who might, in some cases, be subordinate to foreign emperors just as territorial or tribal sovereign Mongol khans might be subject to one of several Khagans or Great khans. Confusingly, some Chinese emperors styled many or all close male relatives of certain kinds such as brothers, uncles, or nephews as wang, a term for king, using it as a courtesy title. However, Chinese histories since ancient works such as Shiji were also fairly liberal in terming local tribal chiefs as "king" of a particular territory ranging from vast to tiny, using convenient terms of the form "(locality)" + "(king)" such as Changshawang, "King of Changsha" which was briefly recognized as a kingdom but was usually a smaller part of Chu state or just a county of the Sui dynasty state, or phrases such as Yiwang, "Yi (Eastern) Foreign ('barbarian') king(s)," while in other cases or by other authors other terms such as [tusi], "native chief" might be used for the same office. The downward extensibility of terms for "king" in more casual usage also influences other allusive uses of these terms. In modern colloquial Chinese the term "king" is sometimes also used, roughly as loosely as in English, for such non-literal terms as mien da wang, "great king of noodles" for a pasta-lover, where an English-speaker might use such terms as [King of the Road].
  Family members of individual sovereigns were also born to titles or granted specific titles by the sovereign, largely according to family tree proximity, including blood relatives and in-laws and adoptees of predecessors and older generations of the sovereign. Frequently, the parents of a new dynasty-founding sovereign would become elevated with sovereign or ruling family ranks, even if this was already a posthumous act at the time of the dynasty-founding sovereign's accession.
  Titles translated in English as "prince" and "princess" were generally immediate or recent descendants of sovereigns, with increasing distance at birth from an ancestral sovereign in succeeding generations resulting in degradations of the particular grade of prince or princess and finally degradation of posterity's ranks as a whole below that of prince and princess. Sovereigns of smaller states are typically styled with lesser titles of aristocracy such as Duke of a Duchy or Marquis rather than as hereditary sovereign Princes who do not ascend to kingship as in the European case of the Principality of Monaco, and dynasties which gained or lost significant territory might change the titles of successive rulers from sovereign to aristocratic titles or vice versa, either by self-designation of the ruler or through imposed entitlement from a conquering state. For example, when Shu (state)'s kings were conquered by Qin (state), its Kaiming rulers became Marquises s
caption: Empress Dowager Cixi, Regent of China considered de facto sovereign of China for 47 years during AD 1861–1908
exif: {}