Shang Yang

Mm-hmm.

Uh, and you had, um, bawangs like, uh, like most famously probably Shang Yang, um, who are just like c- who, who kind of like i- in this view sort of exceeded the, uh, the kind of like traditional authority that these authors were imagining, like, uh, existed in the, in the golden ages that sometimes-

Mm-hmm

... uh, Confucius, uh, vaguely alludes to, right?

So she was all in with Huang-Lao Taoism.

Huang-Lao Taoism, in a Georgia peanut shell, is a hybrid of Taoist principles and the legalism that had been refined since Shang Yang's time into what it had become at the time of the founding of the Han.

What this meant in reality was the practice of the Taoist concept of wu wei, or non-action or non-interference, with the unforgiving harshness of legalist penalties to keep everyone in check.

Empress Dou, as long as she had been calling the shots since Emperor Wen's passing, called for minimal government, low taxes, and Taoist beliefs that called for harmony with nature.