董仲舒 · Dong Zhongshu

Dong Zhongshu (c. 179–104 BCE) is the figure who made Confucianism *imperial*. Before him, in the early Han, the court still patronized several schools (Daoist, Legalist, Confucian) as alternatives. Dong persuaded Emperor Wu to adopt Confucianism as the official state doctrine — and not just adopt it, but absorb it: his distinctive move was to fuse Confucian ethics with the cosmology of yin and yang and the Five Phases (五行), so that the emperor's rule was framed as the moral pivot of the universe, with Heaven's mandate (天命) contingent on virtuous conduct. His major work is the Chunqiu Fanlu (春秋繁露, Luxuriant Dew of the Spring and Autumn Annals), read alongside the Chun Qiu in this library. Without Dong the later tradition might have stayed one philosophy among several; with him, Confucianism became the water the next two millennia of Chinese statecraft swam in. Reserved placeholder: the Chinese text exists on ctext.org but is not yet ingested.