Chinese History

We have just started our new unit on Chinese literature stuff (basically it's just some Chinese history written in a very ficticious way). I remember studying the Han dynasty back in seventh grade, and I still remember how the empress and court would fight against each other. Since the emperor died in a very early age, his son would then succeed in an even younger age (sometimes, the new emporer can be only a few years old). Since he is very young, he would listen to his mom (ie the empress) and consult her about stuff. Thus, it led to a situation in which the empress would control most administration issues and appoint favorable people to high position. So, the empress would rule the country for a while. When the young emporer has grown up, and is able to rule the nation, he would usually the excess power his mom has over the nation. So, he would then join the court (or officials who are loyal to him rather than to the empress), and would begin reforming the governement. But of course, we didn't go into such depth as of reading the Shiji (史記) back in those days. On the side note, Shiji is written in classical Chinese, so it is pretty hard to understand. The reason for this is that the sentence structure of classical Chinese is more compact. By compact I mean classical Chinese use less words to convey the same idea comparing to modern Chinese language. For example, an idea that requires 10 words in modern Chinese can be completely expressed with 7 or less words in classical Chinese. So sometimes, it is just difficult to completely understand the idea with the more compact sentence structure.