Hmmmm

Enough to get a start, then he just kept stumbling into a series of opportunities to get more followers over and over. Also helped that the Qin dynasty was dealing with like 6 simultaneous rebellions from a previous war of expansion. Liu was in the right place at the right time and was such a massive improvement over the dickheads ruling most places under the Qin he just kept advancing.

He wasn't alone at the top of one instant big army. He joined a lord who was already making his own kingdom, like several others, as the Qin were losing control of a lot of land. Liu Bang did become one of that lesser lord's two top generals, and the other general, Xiang Yu, is the one who raced to the Qin capital and burned the palace.

Then Xiang Yu ordered the official split of the Qin empire into like a dozen smaller kingdoms, giving some of them to his friends, and then went around slaughtering them to reunite the land under his control, because that was his fucking jam (that was after having made his own former lord the new emperor, and then murdered him). Liu Bang was one of them, getting his own army, and ran around uniting people like smart tacticians and leaders with their own armies faster than Xiang Yu could kill them. He won that race, Xiang Yu got himself cornered and alone (and was so metal he cut his own head off in the middle of the battlefield when he was the last one standing on his side), and Liu Bang founded his dynasty with all the people who put him there.

Pretty sure he was an aristocrat. "Low-ranking official" in this context basically means "from an unimportant noble family, or low-ranking within a medium-importance noble family."

Basically, infinitely higher standing than a peasant, yet still the dirt beneath the shoes of the high-ranking nobles.

Confucian bureaucracies were highly stratified.

Its a kind of crown/cap, hair is tucked into it and secured via a hairpin stuck through it

Emperor shit, even

Wikipedia has from the Ming era (much later).

At best it's modern art, at worst it's generated

Human Era for the win

We can only do that when we know how many years go by, though. Western History can maybe count back safely some centuries before that, but beyond that we find some calendar discrepancies, we're missing some rulers and we know we have incorrect reign lengths, and depending one which one we pick, the whole thing shifts maybe a decade or two (short / intermediate / long chronology in Mesopotamia and Egypt), so that's not ideal. Eastern chronologies aren't any safer beyond 1000 BCE either. As you may say, people learned to write before they learned to count.

Even the Julian / Gregorian calendar counted back and was still off by 3 to 7 years.