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Shang Yang, chief,
minister in Qin
Shihuangdi (Qin Shi Huang)
Liu Bang, founder of
the Han Dynasty
Emperor Wu, holder of the
Mandate of Heaven,
lest
there be anarchy
Han Empire, 100 BCE
Wang Mang. He didn't know
how to
make a revolution.
Liu Xiu as Emperor Guangwu
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During the lifetime of Mencius and the Taoist Zhuangzi, a Legalist named Shang Yang became chief minister to the local ruler of Qin. Qin was a principality in the Wei River Valley, where the Chuanrong had overrun the Zhou king in 771. Qin was one of the smaller of the seventeen or so states that made up Zhou civilization, and it was seen by peoples of the others states as inferior, as semi-barbaric, because of the many Tibetan and Turkish people that it had absorbed. Qin retained the martial spirit and vigor of nomadic herdsmen, and Qin was a thoroughfare for trade between Zhou civilization and the tribal lands in Central Asia, a trade that had been contributing to Qin's wealth.
As chief minister, Shang Yang began organizing Qin according to Legalist tenets. He convinced the ruler of Qin to apply law to all his subjects. With this, he sought to reward people for good service and merit rather than give favor according to kinship. He rewarded battlefield heroism. He had none of Confucianism disdain for commerce and instead encouraged trade and work. He encouraged the making of cloth for export. He threatened with slavery any able-bodied man who was not engaged in a useful occupation. And he encouraged immigration: he asked educated and talented persons from other principalities to move to Qin, and he offered farming people from other principalities a piece of virgin lands and promised that they would be exempt from military service.
Many came to Qin, increasing Qin's manpower and food production and strengthening its military. The size of an army had become more significant - armies no longer being mainly adventuresome aristocrats. With commoners flooding into the army of Qin, the ruler of Qin was able to reduce the power of his warrior-aristocrats and nobles. In one revolutionary sweep the ruler of Qin divided his principality into counties and had these counties administered by appointed officials rather than by nobles - while the divisive power of nobles in other states in Zhou civilization was being eliminated only gradually.
When the ruler of Qin died, Shang Yang was left without protection at court. Jealous and power hungry persons within the court had Shang Yang executed, but the wealth and power of the principality of Qin lived on. And Qin started winning large battles. In 314 BCE - twenty-four years after the death of Shang Yang - Qin won a military victory over nomads to its north. In 311, Qin expanded southward against more nomadic people, and there it founded the city of Chengdu. By now, other states had expanded: Yan against so-called barbarians east of the Liao River, and Chu south of the Yangzi River. War and conquest had reduced the number of states to eleven. Qin joined a coalition of four other states against Qi, which the allies of Qin feared the most. Qi was traditionally expansionist and hegemonic, well organized, densely populated relative to most other states, high in food production and had grown wealthy also from trade in iron and other metals. To their detriment, the allies of Qin viewed Qin as semi-barbaric and therefore weaker and less of a threat than Qi.
In 256, Qi absorbed Lu, and Qin expanded into territory that belonged to the Zhou family - an area around Luoyang containing about 30,000 people and thirty-six villages. A Zhou prince counter-attacked, trying to claim the Zhou throne for himself. Qin's army defeated him, and the Zhou came to an end.
In 246 BCE, Yong Zheng, the thirteen-year-old son of the ruler of Qin, succeeded his father. After sixteen years of rule, Zheng embarked upon the conquest of the remaining states that had been a part of Zhou civilization. Armies of hundreds of thousands were involved on both sides. Qin defeated one state after another: Han in the year 230, Zhao in 228, Wei in 225, the large but more sparsely populated and less tightly knit Chu in 223, Yan in 222 and the powerful state of Qi in 221. Occasionally, to eliminate possible military opposition, Qin's armies slaughtered all enemy males of military age.
What is called the Period of Warring States was over. Zheng became ruler of all that had been Zhou civilization. He went to a sacred mountain, Dai Shan, where, it would be said, he received the mandate from heaven to rule the entire world. He took the name Shihuangdi (or Qin Shi Huang) and expanded the frontiers of what had been Zhou civilization - southward to Guangzhou and to Guangxi, creating what would thereafter be considered China. And he pushed into Annam, or northern Vietnam - an area the Chinese would hold only temporarily. Shihuangdi had become the First Emperor and great father of China.
Many of those whom Shihuangdi conquered obeyed him from fear rather than seeing him as their legitimate ruler or as having heaven's mandate, and some in various areas continued to fight his rule. To further secure his rule, Shihuangdi tried collecting weapons from all those not in his armies. He saw danger in what people thought, and in 213 BCE his agents began confiscating books that he thought were dangerous: all books other than those on subjects thought practical, such as agriculture, forestry, herbal medicine and divination. The confiscated books were burned, except for one copy of each, which were to be kept from the public in the state's private library. Among the burned books were the centuries old writings of Confucius and books by followers of Confucius. Future generations of Confucianists would see Shihuangdi as evil, and they would accuse him of having buried 460 scholars alive - a misunderstanding. Instead, he had merely had them executed. He had disliked hearing their complaints.
Across China, Shihuangdi took powers away from the local nobles - as had been done in Qin the century before - ending feudalism. In the place of the nobles he divided China into thirty-six administrative units, each staffed by people appointed by and responsible to his administration, and he gave his administration the exclusive rights to tax and mint coins. And from the provinces to his capital, Xianyang, moved 120,000 noble families.
Shihuangdi was hardworking, setting daily quotas of administrative tasks for himself and not resting until he had completed them, and he was good about consulting with his ministers. He standardized Chinese script, weights and measures, and laws. Across China he spread the right of people to buy and sell land - which increased his revenues from taxation. He built magnificent public buildings in his capital and great palaces for himself. He expanded canals for irrigation and transportation, and to interconnect his empire he also built a vast system of highways.
Embittered aristocrats and oppressed intellectuals hated him. He was hated as a conqueror and for his heavy taxation and harsh legal code. Common people hated him for working them hard on his building projects. Fearing assassination, Shihuangdi had secret passages throughout his great palace and slept in a different palace apartment each night. It was not the serene life sought by the Taoists, and the Confucianists must have seen him as an immoral usurper. But he was a man of religion, and he worried about the sexual morality of his subjects, believing that behavior displeasing the gods would adversely affect the well-being of his kingdom.
Shihuangdi liked touring his capital city incognito at night, and he liked to travel through his empire, to cities, mountains, rivers, lakes and to the shores of the sea. It was said that when a strong wind impeded his crossing a river, he sent 3,000 prisoners to deforest a nearby mountain that was believed to be the home of a goddess who had created the wind.
In 210, at the age of forty-nine, Shihuangdi, became sick while on one of his journeys, and he died. His death was followed by an attempt by palace eunuchs to hold onto influence. They murdered some of Shihuangdi's top aids, withheld news of Shihuangdi's death and sent a forged note to Shihuangdi's son and heir, ordering him to commit suicide, which he did. Then they elevated to the throne a younger son of Shihuangdi, a boy whom they hoped to control.
Some in areas recently conquered by Shihuangdi saw in his death an opportunity to break from Qin rule, and some intellectuals came out against the rule of Shihuangdi's younger son. Peasants decided it was an opportune time to express their displeasure with imperial authority, the result largely of their having suffered too much forced labor on Shihuangdi's many construction projects. Some commoners began killing local officials. Among common people there arose local leaders who led them in rebellion. And in an attempt to regain their former powers, noble families began organizing their own gangs of armed men.
Early during the chaos, a middle-aged rebel leader and former Qin policeman named Liu Bang gathered an increasingly large army under him. He allied himself with a more powerful rebel, a noble named Xiang Yu, who was organizing military operations against Qin rule and hoping to re-establish the privileges of his family. Respecting the power of Liu Bang's force, Xiang You made him prince of the district of Han.
Shihuangdi had claimed that his dynasty would last 10,000 generations, but the rebellion was too great for his son and the eunuchs around him, and in 206 BCE an army under Liu Bang defeated the Qin army and entered the capital city: Xianyang. All members of the royal family were slaughtered, including the boy-emperor. Xianyang was burned to the ground, and the state library that contained the only copy of various forbidden books burned with it. The centuries old writings of Confucius and others would have to be recreated from memory and imagination.
With the Qin emperor defeated, Liu Bang and Xiang Yu warred against each other. Xiang Yu was a brilliant general and a colorful leader, but he relied too much on ruthlessness as a means of winning obedience. He slaughtered defeated troops, and in taking cities he looted and seized attractive women. Liu Bang was colorless but he made an effort to conciliate and convert those he defeated. He was a more attractive leader, and he surrounded himself with bright and sound thinkers. More than coercion was contributing to success in creating order. Liu Bang defeated Xiang Yu, and in the year 202, having established military supremacy, he made himself emperor of all China. The era of Chinese history called the Han had begun.
In 202 BCE, Liu Bang, the former policemen, defeated his brilliant and more ruthless rival, Xiang Yu. The nicer guy won again, and Liu Bang became emperor. As the prince of Han he began what was to be known as the Han dynasty, his heirs to hold his family name: Liu.
Liu Bang's fight for power continued, Liu having to fight numerous small wars to consolidate his power, some against former allies. Another power consideration that Liu faced was the confederation of tribes on China's northern border, led by a Turkish speaking people called the Xiongnu. The Xiongnu were nomadic herders with supplementary agriculture and some slaves. And like other nomads they had a warrior tradition. The Xiongnu had been making raids into China. Liu Bang believed that he was not yet strong enough to defeat the northern tribes, so he bribed the Xiongnu with food and clothing in exchange for their agreeing to no longer raid. And he gave the king of the Xiongnu a woman in marriage whom he claimed was a Chinese princess.
Liu Bang's government was, of course, a return to authoritarian rule. Democracy was out of the question in China as it was around 200 BCE in other civilizations. Like Israel's Jeroboam, Liu Bang was no revolutionary. For Liu good government was a strong government - one that could maintain adequate submission. Liu began building a new capital, at Chang'an - which was to become the grandest city in the world. But more to the goal of a strong government he wanted centralized management of his empire, and for this he needed an army of civil servants. For reliable control over the vastness of his empire he installed his brothers, uncles and cousins as regional princes. He sought the continued support of local warlords, who had been a part of his coalition in winning power, and those who had served him as generals or as chancellors he made lesser nobles. Those local Qin administrators who had supported him he left in place, and some friendly nobles he restored to their lands.
Liu Bang sought support also from the peasants. He lowered their taxes and the taxes of others. In places he protected peasants from former nobles trying to retrieve lands they had lost. He made amends to the peasants by not working them as hard as had the former emperor, Shihuangdi. And the peasants believed that because Liu had been a peasant that he would continue to govern in their interest.
Drawing on his peasant origins, Liu Bang demonstrated his disdain for scholars by urinating into the hat of a court scholar, but in trying to govern he came to see benefit in the use of scholars, and he made peace with them. Many scholars were Confucianists, and he began treating the Confucianists with greater tolerance - while he continued to outlaw Confucianist denunciations of the Legalist point of view.
Confucianists aside, Liu was looking for good civil servants and he found them in the families of a new class of gentlemen farmers called the gentry - a class different from the nobility. At first, Liu Bang and his aides had tried filling civil service positions with their civil war comrades, but they discovered that these men were inadequate administrators. And having little faith in the innate abilities of soldiers as administrators, Liu Bang rejected military men for these positions. Previous dynasties had placed successful merchants in the civil service, but with Liu and his aides having peasant backgrounds they distrusted merchants. Instead, they turned to men from wealthy landowning families, mostly families that had grown wealthy in recent generations. This new class - the gentry - was to send its most able sons into careers in government and let its less able sons run the farm. And with a new interest in opportune marriages, the new class began according its females more respect.
Liu Bang died in 195 BCE at the age of sixty, and in death he was given the honorific name Gaodi. Power remained with Liu Bang's wife, the Dowager Empress Lu. In China, as elsewhere, authoritarian rule meant family rule, and it meant struggles for power within families. Empress Lu removed members of Liu Bang's family from positions of power and replaced them with members of her family. After five years of rule she died, and Liu Bang's relatives moved to take back their family's dominance, and they killed every member of Empress Lu's side of the family. A son of Liu Bang born to a concubine became emperor, reviving Han rule, and he became known as Wendi, or Emperor Wen.
With the monarchical system of government, Han rule was on a long range course toward disaster, but the short term was served by Wendi's ability as a ruler. He was known for his regard for the interests of his subjects. When famines occurred, Wendi provided famine relief. He provided pensions for the aged. He freed many slaves, and he abolished China's cruelest methods of executions. During his reign, economics was seriously studied, and Wendi gave economic matters serious consideration. He helped the economy by reducing restrictions on copper mining, by spending money frugally and by reducing taxes that had been imposed on the peasantry.
Under Wendi, China enjoyed internal peace and unprecedented prosperity. With this came magnificent art that would dazzle people in modern times. And with prosperity China's population began to increase, and people pushed into and began clearing and cultivating new lands.
The gentry benefited from the economic boom, and many of them moved to the city. The gentry wished to be thought of as gentlemen like the nobles. This elitism, and the prosperity, benefited Confucianism. With time to read the gentry became interested in the old scholarship. With a renaissance in scholarship, attempts were made to recreate the books that had been burned during the rule of Shihuangdi. Attracted to Confucianism's respect for authority and proper behavior, gentry intellectuals became predominately Confucian. Wendi promoted Confucian scholars to his government's highest offices. He became the first emperor openly to adopt Confucian teachings - as Confucius had dreamed an emperor would. But the rise in Confucianism was not to save China from political and social disaster.
In 156 BCE, the son of Wendi, Jingdi, succeeded his father as emperor. He ruled sixteen years and attempted to extend his family's domination over noble families. War between these nobles and Jingdi ended well for Jingdi. It ended in a compromise, the nobles keeping some of their privileges and powers but no longer permitted to appoint ministers for their fiefs.
In 141 BCE, Jingdi was succeeded by his son, Wudi, a bright and spirited sixteen year-old who enjoyed risking his life hunting big game. Emperor Wu prolonged the good times for the Han dynasty. Wudi began his rule with a hands-off approach to commerce and economic opportunity, which allowed the growth of the economy's private sector. He kept his civil servants under tight control and treated the smallest protest from any quarter as disloyalty. He ended Jingdi's compromise with the nobility, warred against China's most defiant princes, and at the local level he gave more authority to his representatives and civil servants.
Wudi altered laws of inheritance. Instead of a family's land remaining under the eldest son, he gave all the sons of a family an equal share of their father's land, which did much to break great estates into smaller units. And in 138 BCE, Wudi sent China's first known explorer, Zhang Qian, to Parthia, west of Bactria, to establish relations with the Kushan (Yuzhi).
In the twentieth year of his rule, Wudi made Confucianism China's official political philosophy. Confucianism became dominant in the civil service while Legalist rivals continued to hold positions there. Examinations for China's 130,000 or so civil service positions tested an applicant's knowledge of Confucian ideology, knowledge of ancient writings and rules of social grace rather than technical expertise. Theoretically these examinations were open to all citizens, but in reality they were open only to those with adequate respectability, which excluded artisans, merchants and others of lesser status than the gentry - no doubt a lot of people who could have served China well.
On the job training for civil servants occurred in bureaucracies at the local level. And merit, dear to the hearts of Confucianists, became a consideration during and after a civil servant's apprenticeship. A young man who proved himself able as a clerk might become a manager. And, after proving himself as a manager, he might move up to a position as an advisor in attendance at the emperor's palace, or he might move to a high position in the government at a regional capital.
With economic prosperity, China was better able to wage war. Wudi believed that he was strong enough to stop payments to the Xiongnu begun by Liu Bang. He was concerned that the Xiongnu might send an army into northern China's sparsely populated steppe lands or that they might ally themselves with the Tibetans, and he wished to make trade routes for commerce with Central Asia secure from assault. So Wudi launched a series of military campaigns. These were led by his generals, but the campaigns earned for Wudi recognition as a ruler of vigor and bravery.
Wudi's drive against the Xiongnu was costly in manpower but it pushed most of the Xiongnu back from China's northern frontier. Perhaps as many as two million Chinese migrated into the newly conquered territory, and there Wudi creating colonies of soldiers and civilians. Those Xiongnu who stayed behind were converted to farming, drafted for construction labor and employed as farm laborers. And some of them were drafted into China's army, their families forced to remain where they were as hostages to assure against treason.
The war against the Xiongnu stimulated exploration farther westward. After a thirteen-year absence and ten years of captivity by the Xiongnu, the explorer Zhang Qian returned to Wudi's court and brought with him the first reliable description of Central Asia. Wudi ordered Zhang Qian and assistants back to Central Asia, and they gathered information about India and Persia and explored the fertile farmlands of Bactria. Their explorations, and China's success against the Xiongnu, brought an exchange of envoys between China and states to the west, and it opened for the Chinese the 4000-mile trade route that would become known as the Silk Road. China began importing a superior breed of horses, and it began growing alfalfa and grapes. Wudi learned more about the origins of goods that China was importing. For added revenues he demanded that neighboring states pay his empire to sell their goods to the Chinese, and he began military campaigns to force them to do so.
Meanwhile, Wudi sent his armies north and south. In 108 BCE, for the sake of control in the northeast, Wudi conquered an iron-using kingdom in northern Korea. This was a kingdom equal in many ways to the Chinese states before the unification of China in 221 BCE, and a kingdom with many Chinese refugees from the previous century. In the south, Wudi's armies conquered territory that China lost during the civil war that brought the Han dynasty to power, including the port town of Guangzhou. Chinese migrants followed the army. Then, with heavy fighting, Wudi's army conquered northern Vietnam, an area the Chinese called Annam , or "pacified south." Here, too, Chinese migrants came, and some would settle near the Annamite Mountains in the center of Vietnam. The Chinese introduced Vietnam to the water buffalo, metal plows and other tools, and they brought to Annam their written language. The Chinese began to change the people of Annam from slash and burn cultivators into a more settled life. They divided Annam into administrative areas, each administration responsible for collecting taxes and supplying soldiers for the central government. But Chinese rule in Annam would remain tenuous, its jungles and mountains giving sanctuary to Vietnamese who would conduct continuous raids and skirmishes against the Chinese.
Wudi's wars of expansion and his maintenance of large armies of occupation were a burden on China's economy. They more than offset the benefits from the increase in trade that followed his conquests. Imports contributed more to the pleasures of the wealthy than they did to China's economic vitality. Legalist government officials made matters worse. They were hostile to private tradesmen, and they led a drive for government control of the economy. Under their influence the government levied a new tax on boats and carts and took over trade in China's two most profitable industries: salt and iron. And with the rise of government involvement, the economy suffered.
The same move to larger land holdings that changed Roman agriculture was changing Chinese agriculture, except that in China the number of people in the countryside had been growing. With the size of lands of the wealthy increasing and the peasant population also increasing, a shortage of land developed. Gentry bureaucrats sought a hedge against insecurity by buying land and often taking advantage of their office to do so, and often they were able to make their land tax exempt. Ordinary peasants were paying a larger share in taxes, resulting in their greater need to borrow money - at usurious rates. Farming productivity declined. Many peasants were evicted or were forced to leave farming, making more land available for the gentry. Some peasants who left farming resorted to banditry, and some struggling peasants sold their children into slavery.
Conscription into the military and conscription for labor added to the peasantry's discontent. China's most renowned Confucian scholar, Dong Zhongshu, was outraged by the plight of the peasants, and he led the way in expressing concern about the social decay. He complained about the vast extent of lands owned by the wealthy while the poor had no spot to plant their two feet. He complained of those who tilled the land of others having to give away as much as fifty percent of the harvests they produced. Dong Zhongshu recognized the disadvantage faced by those farmers who could not afford to buy iron tools, who had to till with wood and to weed with their hands. He complained that common peasants had to sell their crops when prices were low and then had to borrow money in the spring in order to start sowing when interest rates were high. And he complained about the thousands put to death every year for banditry.
Dong Zhongshu proposed to Wudi a remedy for the economic crisis: reduce the taxes on the poor; reduce the unpaid labor that peasants had to perform for the state; abolish the government's monopoly on salt and iron; and improve the distribution of farm lands by limiting the amount of land that any one family could own. Nothing came of Dong Zhongshu's suggestions. Wudi wanted peasants to prosper, but he was often deceived by the gentry bureaucrats who governed at the local level. The drive for reform was being led by a Confucianist, but the Confucianist gentry did not rally against their own economic interests. Wudi's only substantial response to the economic decline was to levy higher taxes on the wealthy and to send spies around to catch attempts at tax evasion. He chose to ignore land redistribution, not wishing to offend wealthy landowners, believing that he needed their cooperation to finance his military campaigns.
In 91 BCE, as Wudi's fifty-four year reign neared its end, around the capital violent warfare erupted over who would succeed him. On one side was Wudi's empress and his heir, and on the other was the family of one of Wudi's mistresses. The two families came close to destroying each other. Then, just before Wudi's death, a compromise heir was chosen: an eight-year-old who was to be known as Zhaodi, who was put under the regency of Huo Guang, a former general.
Huo Guang sponsored a conference to inquire into the grievances of his emperor's subjects. Invited to the conference were government officials of the Legalist school and worthy representatives of Confucianism. The Legalists argued for maintaining the status quo. They argued that their economic policies helped maintain China's defenses against the continued hostility of the Xiongnu and that they were protecting the people from the exploitation of traders.They argued in favor of the government's policy of western expansion on the grounds that it brought the empire horses, camels, fruits and various imported luxuries, such as furs, rugs and precious stones. The Confucianists, on the other hand, made a moral issue of peasant grievances. Also they argued that the Chinese had no business in Central Asia and that China should stay within its borders and live in peace with its neighbors. The Confucianists argued that trade is not a proper activity of government, that government should not compete with private tradesmen, and they complained that the imported goods spoken of by the Legalists have found their way only into the houses of the rich.
Under Huo Guang's regency, taxes were reduced and peace negotiations began with the Xiongnu chieftains. The young emperor, Zhaodi, died in 74 BCE, and conflict erupted again at the palace. Zhaodi's successor was emperor for only twenty-seven days when Huo Guang replaced him with someone he thought he could control: Xuandi. Six years later, Huo Guang died peaceably, but palace rivalry led to charges of treason against Huo Guang's wife, son and many of Huo Guang's relatives and family associates, and they were executed.
Then the emperor Xuandi ruled for twenty-six years, during which he tired to reduce the corruption that had crept into government, and he tried to provide help in eliminating the suffering among the peasants. But his attempts were ineffective, and his son and heir, Yuandi, was the first of a string of dysfunctional monarchs - the chance of an inept monarchs inheriting power again manifesting itself.
Yuandi took power in 48 BCE at the age of twenty-seven. He was a timid intellectual who spent much time with his concubines - who were too numerous for him to know all personally. Rather than govern, Yuandi left power in the hands of his eunuch secretaries and members of his mother's family.
Yuandi's son, Chengdi, became emperor in 32 BCE, at nineteen, and he also also had little enthusiasm for governing and was most concerned with personal pleasures, including visiting houses of prostitution at night. During Chengdi's twenty-seven-year reign he sought guidance from omens, and to satisfy the jealousy of one of his women, he murdered two of his sons born to other women.
In 6 BCE, Chengdi was succeeded by Ngaidi, who lived in the company of homosexual boys, one of whom he appointed commander-in-chief of his armies. With the decline in quality of monarchs following the reign of Wudi, some Confucian scholars declared that the Han dynasty had lost its Mandate from Heaven, and this became widely believed.
As during the period of warring states (475-221 C.E.) and as with the Greeks during the Peloponnesian War, difficult times in China did not hinder intellectual vitality. Decline in China had brought disappointment, and with disappointment had come a resurgence in Taoist intellectuality, while Legalist philosophy continued its hold among some, especially in government. Confucianists tried to counter rival schools of thought by forming a more comprehensive view of humanity and the universe. Dong Zhongshu brought a variety of ideas into Confucian philosophy, including the concept of Yin and Yang - an idea that had arisen to explain all change, physical and social.
Yin and Yang were seen as the two basic opposing forces in the world. Yin was female: the moon, cold, water, earth, nourishment, sustenance, recessives, autumn, winter, et cetera. Yang was male: the sun, fire, heat, heaven, creation, dominance, spring and summer. It was believed that if Yin reached an extreme it was transformed into Yang, and if Yang reached an extreme it was transformed into Yin - a view of the world that would not be found useful by scientists centuries later.
Confucianists and others who believed in Yin and Yang continued to describe both heaven and earth as flat and the sun as revolving around the earth. The Confucianists believed the world consisted of five basic elements: fire, earth, metal, water and wood. They further tried to make the universe comprehensible by adopting ideas from the Book of Changes, or I-Ching, which saw the universe affected by the arrangement of numbers, seeing numbers not as mere human inventions for measurement but as having power themselves. They believed that by studying combinations from eight trigrams and sixty-four hexagrams one could uncover any possible activity in nature.
To round out their view of the universe, Confucianists adopted an explanation of the origins of the universe. They believed that in the beginning all was vague and amorphous, that this was followed by emptiness, and that emptiness had produced the universe. They believed that what was clear and light in weight had drifted upward to become heaven, and that what had been turbid and heavy had solidified and become earth. The combined essences of heaven and earth, they believed, became Yin and Yang and a great oneness.
In CE 6, Ngaidi was succeeded by a two year-old, Ruzi. Domination of the palace came under the family of the old widow of the emperor from 48 to 32 BCE, Yuandi, and she made her nephew, Wang Mang, regent over Ruzi. Wang Mang was a Confucianist, and many Confucianists looked to him with hope that China would be ruled again with moral purpose, and some of them looked to him to found a new dynasty. Encouraged by widespread support among Confucianists in 9 C.E., Wang Mang declared himself emperor, ending rule by the Han dynasty. And Wang began a struggle for recognition of his legitimacy.
Wang Mang hoped to win support from common people by reforms. Like the Yawhist priesthood during the reign of king Josiah, Wang announced the discovery of written matter: books written by Confucius, supposedly discovered when Confucius' house had been torn down more than 200 years before. The discovered works contained declarations supporting the very kind of reform that Wang sought.
Wang defended his policies by quoting from the discovered works. Following what was portrayed as Confucian scripture, he decreed a return to the golden times when every man had his measure of land to till, land that in principle belonged to the state. He declared that a family of less than eight that had more than fifteen acres was obligated to distribute the excess amount of land to the landless. He moved to reduce the tax burden on poor peasants, and he devised a plan to have state banks lend money to whomever needed it at an interest of ten percent a year, in contrast to the thirty percent that was the going rate by private lenders. In order to stabilize the price of grain, he made plans for a state granary, hoping that this would discourage the wealthy from hoarding grain and from profiting from price fluctuations. Wang also delegated a body of officials to regulate the economy and to fix prices every three months, and he decreed that critics of his plan would be drafted into the military.
Wang claimed that he was doing the will of Confucius. He announced that his rule was a restoration of the rule of the early Chou kings - an age that the Confucian scholar Mencius had claimed was supposed to return every 500 years. It was about one thousand years since the beginning of Chou rule and 500 years since Confucius had been at the peak of his powers.
Wang believed that his subjects would obey his decrees, but again gentry-bureaucrats gave less importance to their Confucianism than to their wealth. They and other owners of good-sized lands failed to cooperate in implementing Wang's reforms. Without newspapers or television, local people remained unaware of the reforms. Wealthy merchants that Wang Mang's government employed to pursue implementation of the reforms succumbed to bribery and proved interested mainly in enriching themselves. Wang needed a broad base of support and a force willing to move against those violating his land reform laws, but he remained timid and wedded to a pacifistic idealism. Rather than Wang mobilizing a peasant army to enforce his reforms, an army of peasants led by the landed rich mobilized against him.
In the year 11, the Yellow River broke its banks, creating floods from Shandong north to where the river empties into the sea. The usual failure to store enough grain for hard times left people without food. And in the year 14 came cannibalism. Believing that his reform program was a failure, Wang withdrew it. But already armed resistance to his rule had arisen. In Shandong province, near the mouth of the Yellow River, Wang faced an organized movement of disciplined bands of peasants called the Red Eyebrows, led by a former brigand chief. In the neighboring province just to the north, another rebellion arose, and rebellion spread across China. In some places, rebel peasants were led by landlords. Some rebel groupings described Wang rule as illegitimate. And one of the rebel groupings placed at its head a Han prince by the name of Liu Xiu.
Peasant armies murdered and plundered, and peasants marched to the capital killing officials as they went. The troops that Wang sent against the rebel armies joined the rebels or went on sprees of plundering, taking what little food they could find. The basic goodness of people that Confucianists had believed in appeared to have vanished. In the year 23, a rebel army invaded and burned China's great capital, Chang'an. Its soldiers found Wang Mang in his throne-room reciting from his collection of Confucian writings, and Wang Mang was silenced by a soldier cutting off his head.
In the five years following the death of Wang Mang, millions died fighting as rival factions vied with each other for power. The most successful of the rival factions was led by the Han prince, Liu Xiu. He surrounded himself with educated men, and he was popular among his troops. His army was the only force that did not loot when capturing towns, and this helped him win hearts and minds. Liu Xiu took control of the ruined capital, Chang'an. He proclaimed himself emperor, restoring the Han dynasty - to be known as the Later Han, or East Han, dynasty. He moved the capital eastward to Luoyang, which he also controlled. And for eleven more years he had to combat rivals. He absorbed some bands of Red Eyebrow rebels into his army, and his army killed other Red Eyebrows in great numbers.
What had not been accomplished by reforms was accomplished by violence: so many had died in the upheaval that land had become available to anyone who wanted it, and with many money lenders among the dead, many more peasants had become free of debt. Liu Xiu helped the economy by lowering taxes, as much as he thought possible: to a tenth or thirteenth of one's harvest or profits. During his reign of thirty-two years, he attempted improvements by promoting scholarship and by curtailing the influence of eunuchs and some others around the royal family. He defended China's western and northern borders by launching successful military campaigns on these frontiers, pushing back the Xiongnu, enabling him to take control of Xinjiang (the extreme northwest of modern China). Also, he tightened China's grip on the area around the Liao River and northern Korea, and he was able to expand control over all that had been China. The restored Han dynasty appeared to have the won back the Mandate of Heaven.
In CE 57, Liu Xiu died. He took the posthumous title Guang-wudi, and he was succeeded by his son Mingdi, who reigned eighteen years, while China's economy continued to recover. Mingdi's rule has been regarded as harsh.He associated himself with Taoism and theological Confucianism, and he declared himself a prophet. He supported growth in what was considered education, and he lectured on history at Luoyang's new imperial university - a lecture attended by many thousands.
Mingdi was succeeded by Zhangdi, who ruled from CE 75 to 88. Then he was succeeded by Hedi, who ruled from 88 to 106. Despite Hedi's mediocrity, China continued to enjoy a rising prosperity. The university at Luoyang grew to 240 buildings and 30,000 students. China's trade reached a new height. Silk from China was becoming familiar to people as far as the Roman Empire - which was then in its so-called golden age. And in return, China was receiving glass, jade, horses, precious stones, tortoise shell and fabrics.
With China's prosperity came another attempt at expansion westward. A commander of a Chinese army, Ban Chao, led an army of 60,000 unopposed to the eastern shores the Caspian Sea. He wished to send an envoy to make contact with the Romans. But the Parthians feared an alliance between Rome and China. They discouraged Ban Chao with tales of danger, so he turned back.
Having become more aware of the world beyond China, the Chinese heard more rumors about wonderful places. Taoists - who still rejected Chinese civilization as corrupt and who idealized nature and wilderness - helped spread descriptions of far-away places of godliness and paradise. Stories of places of wilderness and paradise appeared at the emperor's court, brought by those who came to demonstrate their magic and to entertain, and the court sometimes responded by sponsoring expeditions to find the wonderful places.
One such story described a paradise along the coast in China's extreme northeast. There the climate was milder than it was inland, and it was said that in this paradise were no diseases, that people never became sick and that people governed themselves. It was said that in this paradise the young and old had equal rights, that people were gentle and had no quarrels, that there was no conflict between humanity and nature, that people received what food they needed from a beneficent river, that drinking the water from this river restored one's body to the tautness and smoothness of youth, and that people lived a hundred years.
Another paradise was rumored to be in the distant mountains of Tibet. There, it was said, a Queen mother ruled who had many servants. In this paradise, cool breezes were said to blow - as opposed to the humidity and heat of the summers in China's inland plains and valleys. It was said that in this paradise were hanging gardens, with ponds and a beautiful lake, that waters there gave one immortality, that one could climb a mountain peak and become a spirit with the power to control the wind and rain, and that one could climb another nearby peak and ascend to heaven.
The Taoists maintained their belief in harmony and solace in nature. They believed in a destiny beyond the disturbing flux of material life, and they maintained their belief in emotional austerity. A devout Taoist, for example, could still explain his not weeping for his wife who had just died by saying that if he wept for her he would be demonstrating his lack of understanding of destiny. Taoism maintained its paradoxical statements, and it maintained anti-Confucianist notions such as one's sons and daughters are not one's possessions.
Taoism was open to a variety of new ideas, including the search for longevity or eternal life by adopting proper attitude and physical techniques. Some Taoists tried to extend the search for salvation in nature by focusing on the bliss of sexual intercourse, and some Taoist holy men searched for everlasting life though ritual exercises or dietary regimes - an experiment of sorts that failed each time that one of them died. But, rather than accept that everlasting life could not be achieved by a special program, their followers explained the failures as the result of circumstances other than human mortality.
Taoism absorbed practices of magic that had existed in some of China's rural communities. Some Taoists adopted gods that were ridiculed by the gentry and the Confucianists. Contrary to Taoism's original belief in inaction, some Taoists actively sought converts, and some Taoists became activists for social change and initiated political programs. Taoism had held no clearly defined orthodoxy or tightly knit organization of priests, but here and there organizations led by priests were developing. Taoist priests gathered around them followers who believed they had joined an exclusive group that was concerned with their well-being. This annoyed China's authorities - Confucianists and gentry-bureaucrats - who feared that unapproved religious cults might develop into a focal point of opposition to their authority.
Among the Taoist cults was one led by Zhangling (or Zhang Taoling) in the province of Sichuan. Zhangling wandered through the countryside promising those who would publicly confess their sins that he would deliver them from illness and misfortune. He claimed that illness was the product of sinful thoughts. Using charms and spells he acquired a reputation as a healer, and the public confessions that he offered gave peasants the feeling that they were cleansing themselves of sin and joining a community.
In the year 142, Zhangling founded a Taoist church, called "The Way of the Great Masters," moving his Taoism from a prescribed way of life to an organized religion. His church also became known as "The Way of the Five Pecks of Rice," five pecks of rice being the annual dues that church members had to pay. Zhangling promised his followers a long life and immortality, and he earned the gratitude of local common folk by getting done what the emperor's authorities had failed to do: repair roads and bridges, store grain and distribute bread to the starving. Zhangling had created a local government that rivaled the authority of the emperor. Without acknowledging it, Taoists were rejoining the world of power politics.
An idea surfaced in China that society was moving, perhaps willy-nilly, to a heavenly state of peace and equality, and coupled with this idea was the notion of public service, which had survived from the times and influence of Mozi. The concept of public service appeared in a book called The Spring and Autumn of Lu Bu-wei, which some consider the start of China's socialist tradition.
Emperors and the Confucianist gentry considered these books subversive, and the authorities sometimes confiscated them. Some of the books proclaimed that peace and equality would be established by heavenly intervention. Some called on people to be devout and to seek salvation. There were people who accepted these books as sacred writings, and at least one book was believed to have been written by someone sent from heaven. Some of the books were called Books of Higher Peace and contained numerous denunciations of the greed and egoism of emperors, and the books announced that society was for common people. One such book, known as the Tai-ping-jing, looked forward to arms and armor being thrown away and people living forever in peace.
While Chinese delved into the world of mystery and spirit they were also making things and developing their skills at manipulating matter and measuring. By the second century CE, China had caught up with, and in some areas had surpassed, Europe and West Asia in science and technology. Paper was coming into use in China. China had a water clock with an accuracy that Europeans would be without for more than a thousand years. China had a lunar calendar that would be consulted into the twentieth century. It had a seismograph that had been invented in CE 132 - eight feet wide and made of bronze. The Chinese observed sun spots, which would not be observed by Europeans until done so by Galileo. And the Chinese charted 11,520 stars and measured the elliptical orbit of the moon. China had a machine that sowed seeds and a machine for husking grain. It had water pumps, and, unlike Roman civilization, the Chinese had wheel barrows. The Chinese had horse collars and stirrups. They were improving their use of herbal medicines and learning more about human anatomy and the diagnosis of physical disorders. They were using minor surgery and acupuncture, and they were aware of the benefits of a good diet.
But life continued to be hard for China's common people - its peasants. Too much was still being taken from them in taxes. They still had to labor once a month for the emperor. Punishments were still harsh. A poor peasant could be executed for using the central part of a highway, which was reserved for the emperor. And not enough grain was being stored for emergencies.
China's prosperity had risen under Hedi (between the years 88 to 106), and the court of Hedi had become in size and luxury equal to the courts of previous Han emperors. At Hedi's court, hundreds of wives and concubines were accompanied by a great many eunuchs to guard them. Under Hedi, eunuchs and family consorts had acquired greater influence, with eunuchs having the ear of the emperor.
Those involved in choosing who was to be a successor to the throne preferred children because children could be dominated more than an adult, leaving considerable power with those who did the choosing. All Han emperors since Mingdi had become emperors when adolescents, two of them as young as two, and most had begun their rule with their dowager empress mother serving as regent. These women remained isolated and dependent upon men - usually their male relatives. As an emperor grew into adulthood, if he rejected his mother's relatives as advisors he usually turned to the only other males with which he had contact - the eunuchs - and he appointed them to high positions as a counter to his mother's influence.
During the reign of Shundi (125-144), rumor spread among China's peasants that the Han emperors had again lost the Mandate of Heaven. Peasant rebellions reappeared. During the reign of Huandi (146 to 168) political decline continued. In 159 the dowager empress died, and eunuchs around Huandi, sensing opportunity, moved to eliminate rival influence by arranging the extermination of members of the empress' clan. Huandi became dependent on the eunuchs. He delegated powers to them, and the eunuchs filled governmental positions with their kinsmen, receiving from the officials or generals that they appointed a payoff in gold.
Huandi died in 168, and the next day his young wife, the empress Dou, was declared empress dowager. She agreed to the selection of a twelve-year-old from out of town. The boy was a great-great-grandchild of the emperor Zhangdi and became the emperor Lingdi. During Lingdi's reign a clash erupted between the eunuchs and Confucianist gentry-bureaucrats. The Confucianists had a long-standing dislike of the eunuchs, seeing them as lacking in education and as interfering with good government.
War erupted between the eunuchs and the Confucianists over the influence of a Taoist magician. The Taoist magician prophesied that a general clemency was forthcoming and had his son murder someone to demonstrate his confidence in the prophecy. The magician's son was a henchman of the eunuchs, and the eunuchs stayed the magician's execution. The governor of the province executed the son anyway. The eunuchs accused the governor of violating an imperial decree and of conspiring with students and scholars to form an illegal alliance against the government. The eunuchs obtained a decree from the emperor, Lingdi, ordering arrests of the students who had been demonstrating and who had been attempting to deliver petitions to the emperor. And soon, many students died in prison.
In the provinces, respect for the authority of the emperor continued to decline. Local magistrates and governors were losing their authority to local men of wealth who often had influence through bribery with eunuchs at the emperor's court. These local men of wealth were in the habit of hiring armed ruffians to look after their interests. And, with the blessings of anti-gentry eunuchs at court, the generals who were commanding troops in China's provinces were growing more independent.
A Taoist named Zhang Jue, who called himself "The Good Doctor of Great Wisdom," had been moving about in the countryside as had Zhangling. He offered magical healing, treated all ailments with water and words and called his method of healing the "Way of the Highest Peace." Zhang Jue also spoke of the Han rulers as having lost the Mandate of Heaven, and he proclaimed their imminent fall. Within ten years, his movement grew to hundreds of thousands. His movement was divided into districts, with each district led by a "deputy doctor."
The year of decision for Zhang Jue's movement was 184. The fifth day of the third moon was fixed as the time for a general uprising in Luoyang and surrounding regions. But word of these plans was heard at the imperial court, and the authorities picked up local leaders of the revolt and executed them. Zhang Jue changed his plans and called for an immediate uprising, calling on his followers to burn down official residences and to loot towns. This was to be known as the Yellow Turban rebellion, named after the headdresses of Zhang Jue's movement - yellow signifying their association with the element earth as opposed to the element of fire, which they associated with Han rule. The rebellion spread, and people from all corners of the empire began robbing, killing and heading toward the capital.
The eunuchs and intellectual bureaucrats in Luoyang forgot their differences in their mutual fear and opposition to the Yellow Turbans. Government forces erected fortifications around Luoyang, and the government authorized governors to organize their own armies to combat the rebels. Wealthy landowners also organized armies to defend themselves. But town after town fell to the Yellow Turbans, with governors and local magistrates fleeing before them to avoid being sacrificed to the god of the rebels.
Amid the chaos, the Xiongnu began making raids against the Chinese again. And in Korea, tribal warriors on horseback from the hills pushed against the Chinese there. The government in Luoyang sent no help, and the Koreans overran that portion of Korea ruled by Chinese.
In attempting to defend itself, the Han palace conscripted great numbers, establishing huge armies at a great economic cost, and although the Han armies were weakened by inefficiency and corruption, the Yellow Turbans were no match for them. Militarily the Yellow Turbans were disorganized, and they had been led to believe that their gods had elected them as a force for good, that they were invulnerable and that they did not even need weapons - a view not conducive to an efficient military operation. The mysticism that had been a part of the movement's creation had become a part of its destruction. In the first year of the rebellion, Zhang Jue died, and within a year the rebellion was defeated. For five years sporadic revolts continued. Eight of China's provinces were devastated. Forces opposed to the Yellow Turbans cut down Yellow Turban gangs one after the other. The sporadic fighting continued for another decade, while peasant supporters of the Yellow Turbans returned to the business of surviving through work and to hope of a coming paradise in the world beyond.
Emperor Ling died in 188 or 189, at the age of thirty-three, while military governors were clinging to the greater independence that they had acquired during the war against the Yellow Turbans. A military general who was a popular figure and the half-brother of the dowager empress tried to assert leadership at the palace. He schemed against the court eunuchs and their supporters, and to combat them he invited to the capital general Dong Zhuo and his army from around the Great Wall in the north. But before Dong Zhuo arrived, fighting broke out at the palace. A eunuch murdered the general. The general's allies struck back and burned the palace, killing every eunuch they could find - or anyone who looked like a eunuch because of lack of beard. And more than 2,000 eunuchs, and supposed eunuchs, died.
Soon after, Dong Zhuo arrived in the capital and put to death both the reigning emperor, Shaodi, and the empress dowager. He chose a nine year-old prince as emperor and as a front for his rule, the boy acquiring the titled name of Xiandi. Dong Zhuo swaggered about the court with his sword, behaving in a manner described as debauched and bestial, while his troops, many of whom were Xiongnu, ran about the capital, pillaging and murdering as they pleased.
Then Dong Zhuo went off to do battle with rival generals. The child emperor, Xiandi, and his following, including those who belonged to what had been an ineffective palace militia, burned Luoyang and began a trek westward to Chang'an.They took with them - the story goes - more than a million civilians, most of whom are said to have died of exhaustion and starvation along the way.
Dong Zhuo's lack of concern for hearts and minds worked against him. His bloodthirstiness and fits of temper alienated his subordinate officers, and in the year 192 his officers assassinated him and threw his corpse to a mob that hated him.
A war for supremacy was taking place among China's generals, and in 196 CE, another general, Cao Cao, found the boy emperor, Xiandi. He took control over the boy and declared himself to be the boy's "imperial minister" and to be the protector of the empire. In the name of Xiandi, Cao Cao drafted more men into his army.
Cao Cao was a vigorous, bright and able leader - and a poet. His army is said to have numbered as many as a million men. In bloody battles in northern China he defeated warlord after warlord and restored order there. In 208, Cao Cao marched south in an effort to reunify China. The ensuing battle of Jiangling, along the Yangzi River, became one of the best known in China's history. In that battle, Cao Cao confronted the allied armies of Liu Bei and Sun Juan, and that alliance defeated him, driving Cao Cao back north.
Liu Bei was a member of the Han royal family, and he was a man with a kindly disposition. He might have united China, but his ally, Sun Quan, broke with him, fearing that if Liu Bei were successful he would dominate him. Sun Quan established the kingdom of Wu in the south of China, and he allied with Cao Cao, who ruled the kingdom of Wei in the north (named after the Wei kingdom of the Warring States Period (475-221 CE). Liu Bei built the kingdom of Shu, in Sichuan Province. The phase in China's history called the Three Kingdoms had begun.
Meanwhile, along the Yangzi River near Sichuan, a surviving Tao cult with its own army had established a theocratic state. The cult's founder, Zhang Lu, traced his teachings back a couple of generations to his grandfather, Zhangling. Like Zhangling, he performed what were described as miracle healings, and he preached Zhangling's message of physical and moral well-being, claiming that diseases were punishments for evil deeds and that diseases could be cured by remorse and ceremonial confessions. Zhang Lu's community had communal "friendship" meals, and like Zhangling he had a welfare system for his community and storage for grain and meat. He encouraged equality. His community offered the traveling homeless a place to stay and a meal. And it offered leniency to criminals.
Another Taoist, Zhang Xiu set up an independent state nearby. Despite their mutual devotion to Taoism, the communities of Zhang Lu and Zhang Xiu warred against each other - much as would Christians. And Zhang Lu, it is said, killed Zhang Xiu. Soon thereafter, Zhang Lu had a more formidable opponent, Cao Cao. With his army, Cao Cao overran Zhang Lu's territory. Zhang Lu surrendered to Cao Cao and was rewarded with a fiefdom. It is said that Zhang Lu died shortly thereafter - in 217. And it came to be legend that twenty-six years after his death he was seen by many witnesses ascending to heaven. The legend held that when his grave was opened, in the year 259, his body was found wholly intact, meaning that he had died only in the sense that he had detached from his corpse and had entered paradise.
With the breakup of Han rule, Xiongnu tribesmen from north of China saw opportunity and made continuous hit and run forays into China's heavily populated regions. As had been happening in Europe, the breakdown of government encouraged peasants to give up their independence and to gather for protection into great estates that had a force of armed men. Peasants fleeing to the great estates escaped imperial taxation and labor drafts, but on the estates they became serfs.
Just as Rome's official pagan religion declined during hard times, so too did Confucianism with the chaos during Han rule. Confucianism had been the ideology of China's gentry and aristocracy and had dominated education and the administration of the empire, but, with virtue scarce among men of power, many of China's elite came to view Confucianism's advocacy of loyalty to rulers of virtue as irrelevant, and many saw Confucianism as having failed to meet the world's challenges.
Those giving up on Confucianism searched for an alternative ideology, and one alternative was Taoism. Another was Buddhism, which according to legend had arrived in China in the year 65 in a dream by the Han emperor Mingdi. A rival theory holds that Buddhism had joined Hinduism in spreading eastward with trade from India, Buddhism arriving in China from across the inland trade route through central Asia during the first century. The royal Han court, it is said, welcomed Buddhism to China. But Buddhism had remained isolated during the remainder of Han rule, adhered to only by Indian merchants - men who gave money and land for Buddhist temples and who used Buddhist monasteries as banks and warehouses.
The first Chinese to convert to Buddhism were those who had become tenants on Buddhist temple lands. Buddhist teachings were translated into Chinese. Then, with the breakdown of the Han dynasty, conversions to Buddhism spread among China's masses. The converts had little understanding of the details of Buddhist doctrine, but they found consolation in what Buddhism offered. Buddhism's temples and elaborate rituals were impressive, and Buddhism was a warmer message than Confucianism: a message of salvation through moderation or abstinence and a message of pity for all creatures. Both the Hinayana and the Mahayana schools arrived in China, but it was the Mahayana branch of Buddhism with its salvation and helpful gods that would dominate.
A famous fourteenth century novel, The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, described the times of the Three Kingdoms as a period of romance, heroism and chivalry. But it was hardly romantic for those who lived it. Of the three kingdoms, Wei had the strongest of military, a strength bolstered by its economy and water transport. The Kingdom of Shu was more sparsely populated, an area of mostly forest, and with many people who were not Chinese. In 263, Wei overwhelmed and absorbed Shu, leaving Wei and Wu as rivals. Then Wei's ruler was overthrown from within, one of his generals beginning a dynasty of his own, and, thirty-six years later, in 280, his offspring, Jin Wudi, overpowered and annexed the kingdom of Wu. China was now nominally united, and Jin Wudi extended his power northward to central Korea and southward into Annam. The cycle between unity and disintegration had swung back to unity. A new dynastry, called the Western Jin, had begun ruling China.
Forays against China by the Xiongnu and other tribal people ended for awhile. And the policy of settling tribal people within China was resumed. There was hope for peace, unity and prosperity, and, as early as 280, Jin Wudi began a program of disarmament. Troops were discharged, and metal weapons of value were melted down for coin. But Jin Wudi's attempt at disarmament proved of little benefit. Some discharged soldiers kept their weapons. Soldiers traded their weapons to the Xiongnu in exchange for land. And Princes in outlying areas did not disarm or disband their militias.
Jin Wudi was attempting a return to the greatest period of Han rule, back when peace brought China prosperity and the Han held strong central authority. Jin Wudi initiated reforms aimed at curbing dispersed power - the power of great families. But these reforms failed. At his death in 290, China's great landlords still had private armies.
With Jin Wudi's death came the weakness that occasionally besets monarchies: Jin Wudi's son and successor, Jin Huidi was mentally deficient, and Jin Huidi's wife, Queen Jia, ruled in his place. She was fearful and began arresting and executing anyone whom she saw as a threat to her position. This included a rival faction within the royal family. Warfare erupted. Several dukes and thousands of others were murdered. Queen Jia failed to kill all her opponents, and, in the year 300, a prince named Lun led a coup that killed Queen Jia, the feebleminded emperor, and many others. Lun made himself emperor, and he in turn was killed by Prince Lui. In 302 he was killed by Prince Changsha, who in 303 was killed by a prince called Donghai. In 306, two more princes fell. Then came drought and famine. The central government had grown weak. The cycle of unity and disintegration had swung back to disintegration.
Recommended Books
China and the Search for Happiness by Wolfgang Bauer, 1976
The Ageless Chinese by Dun J. Li, 1971
China, a Macro History by Ray Huang, 1990
The Rise and Splendor of the Chinese Empire by Rene Grousset
The Cambridge History of China. Volume 1: the Ch'in and Han Empires
China, a Cultural History by Anton Cotterell, 1988
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Copyright © 1998 by Frank E. Smitha. All rights reserved.
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