ennobled as Marquis, and at the death of Wu Ti he was appointed Regent. He discovered a plot to depose the young Emperor and assassinate himself, concocted by the family into which he had married his daughter, whose daughter had become Empress. The conspirators were all executed or were forced to commit suicide, and for thirteen years afterwards Ho Kuang's power was supreme. In B.C. 74 the Emperor died without issue, and by Ho's advice a grandson of Wu Ti was chosen to succeed. He proved however to be a dissolute and worthless monarch; and Ho, after consultation with Chang An-shih and T'ien Yen-nien, called a council, at which T'ien threatened with instant death any one who should oppose Ho Kuang. The Empress Dowager was taken into confidence; and the new monarch was brought before her in presence of all the Court, his faults proclaimed and his seal taken from him, he himself being sent home under escort, while some 200 or 300 of his officers were executed. The grandson of Wu Ti's original Heir Apparent who had been forced to commit suicide in B.C. 91, was now raised to the throne under the title of Hsüana Ti. He stood in great awe of Ho Kuang; and one day when the latter accompanied him to the ancestral temple, his Majesty declared that he felt as though he had a bunch of thorns down his back. Ho Kuang and his family were loaded with favours; yet in B.C. 71 his wife secretly caused the young Empress to be poisoned, and then persuaded the Emperor to marry her own daughter. To this crime Ho Kuang does not seem to have been privy. In his last illness the Emperor paid him a kindly visit, and he received a public funeral. Some two years after his death the Empress and her mother were mixed up in a palace intrigue of such gravity that the former committed suicide in despair, two of their male relatives were put to death, and the family prosperity came to a sudden end. Canonised as 宣成.
