As long as that family produces emperors, and they are always dudes... No, they aren't. First off, there were several empress dowagers who wielded tremendous power throughout Chinese history, and there was one very important full-fledged empress, Empress Wu, who ruled China for more than 20 years and founded her own freaking dynasty. And those emperors keep ruling, the dynasty gets to be a dynasty. So the dynasty can end for two reasons. Either they run out of dudes, which never happened thanks to the hard work of many, many concubines, or the emperor is overthrown after a rebellion or a war. This is more or less what happened to all the dynasties, which makes it easy for me to go over to camera two and describe them in a single run-on sentence. Hi there, camera two.