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The Dragon & the Phoenix
Power Struggles in the Imperial Court
The instabilities and conflicts of Han dynasty politics were
often the results of one of the basic difficulties of a hereditary
monarchy. Sometimes it would produce a child sovereign or an adult one
who was not a very capable or energetic ruler. Who would control the
imperial institution in those circumstances? Frequently it would be the
dead emperor’s widow, the dowager empress, and her male relatives. This
domination of the court by “outside relatives” (wai qi)
was one of the most persistent difficulties of Han politics, and it
plagued many later dynasties as well. ...
 In the last years of the reign of Emperor Wu the
families of two of his consorts, Wei and Li, intrigued and occasionally
fought in the streets. The old emperor responded by leaving neither of
them in a position to exercise outside-relative power after his death,
naming an infant related to neither as his heir, and leaving the highly
capable senior official Huo Guang
in charge as regent. “I want my youngest son set up, with you to
act the part of the duke of Zhou.” Huo controlled the court in
cooperation with Sang Hongyang and other generals and officials until
80, then accused them of plotting to depose the emperor and install one
of the regional kings, and exterminated them and their families. In 74
a successor was installed who seemed to be in the hands of the Li
family, outside relations from the reign of Emperor Wu. Amid repeated
references to Yi Yin (the minister who deposed the first ruler of the
Shang dynasty) and the duke of Zhou, Huo Guang secured the consent of
the dowager empress (his own fifteen-year-old granddaughter) and the
capital officials in deposing this emperor and putting a child on the
throne. Highly competent and ruthless, little interested in the
supernatural or in Confucian moral platitudes, Huo dominated the court
unchallenged until his death in 68. His relatives were driven from
power and exterminated in 66. (MOF, 74)
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relatives won choice assignments as generals and provincial officials,
were given noble titles and large estates in the provinces, and used
their influence to secure appointments, tax exemptions, and so on for
lesser men who followed their lead and served their interests. For the
idealistic Confucian,
the power of the outside relatives was a deplorable violation of the
ideals of selection and promotion of officials on the basis of merit
and of decision making based on principled discussion of the issues. A
more distant and more cynical observer might conclude that it was at
least a kind of solution to the inherent problems of hereditary
monarchy and was to a degree inherently self-limiting. As an emperor
came to adulthood, his empress and her relatives would form a faction
of their own. Sooner or later the dowager empress would die, her
relatives would lose their ultimate source of support within the
palace, and the relatives of the present empress would have a chance to
expel and replace them. Thus a kind of circulation of outside relative
cliques followed the passing of the generations. (MOF, 74-75) |
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Wang Mang rose to power as an outside relative of an empress,
the mother of Emperor Cheng, who reigned from 33 to 7 B.C.E. The
Dowager Empress Wang was the center of power in her son’s reign, since
Emperor Cheng was not much interested in the hard work of ruling the
empire. One after another of her brothers and cousins was appointed
marshal of state and general in chief and effectively controlled the
central administration. The dowager empress was not involved in the
details of government, but her position was the ultimate source of her
relatives’ power. Her contribution was simply to be there, to stay
alive; she died in 13 C.E. at the age of eighty-four, her long life
having made possible the rise of Wang Mang through many twistings and
turnings to his ultimate seizure of the imperial throne. ... From beginning to end, Wang Mang’s public life was full
of demonstrations of his humility and selflessness, and also of
ambition, political skill, and ruthlessness. We have to come to terms
with this mix of personal traits if we are to understand his actions,
his appeal to the people of his times, and his ultimate failure.
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Our
efforts are considerably complicated by the biases of the most
important source on his career, a long chapter in the History of Han
by Ban Gu, written in the first century C.E. Ban Gu was a member of an
extremely devoted and eminent family of ministers of the Later Han,
which rose out of the collapse of Wang Mang’s regime. A Confucian
moralist explanation of the fall of Wang Mang and the success of Later
Han had to show that Wang was brought down by his own moral failings,
not by bad luck or events beyond his control. Ban Gu’s account
presents, very skillfully and insidiously, a picture of Wang as a
power-hungry hypocrite. It records Wang’s many selfless deeds very
matter-of-factly, and it is only gradually that Ban Gu argues that none
of Wang’s acts of selflessness were sincere, that all were calculated
to make the best possible impression and to advance his career. (MOF,
77-78) |
 In 1 B.C.E. envoys from a foreign people came
to the capital and presented a white pheasant. It was an auspicious
sign; foreigners had presented a white pheasant to the duke of Zhou. In
1 C.E. various courtiers proposed that the grand dowager empress should
grant him new honors, including the title “Duke Who Brings Peace to the
Han” (An Han gong). Wang
declined repeatedly, insisting that others were more worthy than he.
After his closest associates all had been granted lesser honors, he
finally accepted and was given full power to control the government and
make decisions on behalf of the boy emperor. In 2 C.E. the elaborate
process was begun that would lead to the selection of a wife for the
boy emperor. Wang Mang firmly and repeatedly refused to have his
daughter included among the young women considered, but hundreds of
officials urged that she be selected, and finally he gave in. Now if
the boy lived to adulthood there would be a new Empress Wang, and
the family’s power as the ultimately successful outside relatives would
be unchallengeable.
The normal Han practice was to grant
the father of a new imperial wife a large amount of land and gold;
emperors, after all, were supposed to set an example of filial piety
and generosity to their relatives. Wang Mang accepted these gifts, but
lived much more frugally than most of the great men of his time. He
abstained from meat and rich dishes at any time when there was a food
shortage in the empire, advised the grand dowager empress to dress more
simply, and made large contributions of money and land to relief of the
poor and hungry. Many other great men, it was said, followed his
example in making such contributions. Wang also used his own funds to
support large numbers of scholars at the capital, which enhanced his
reputation for generosity and put some of the best talent in the empire
at his disposal. (MOF, 79-80) |
It is not easy to explain Wang Mang’s decision
to
abandon his declared intention to return power to the Han prince some
day and to take the throne himself. The grand dowager empress was still
alive as the ultimate guarantor of his power. In 9 C.E. he had the Han
prince married to one of his granddaughters, setting the stage for a
still longer continuation of outside-relative power. Perhaps Ban Gu is
right, and usurpation had been his goal all along. Perhaps there were
weaknesses in his position that we cannot see from our limited sources
that impelled him to this step. We do know that at the end of 8 there
was a great rush of reports of portents that Wang should become
emperor. Messengers from Heaven appeared to various people in their
dreams. As a message on a stone was being examined, a wind arose, and
when the cloud of dust subsided there was a pattern of silk on the
ground that was interpreted as another message from Heaven. An official
proposed a reinterpretation of the abortive prophecies of 5 B.C.E. to
mean that a regent would change the reign period.
[The Ceremonies of Zhou]
is the perfect expression of a strand in Chinese political culture of
what might be called bureaucratic idealism, which envisions a realm in
which all major facets of human life are organized according to neatly
nesting hierarchies of bureaucratic terms, boundaries, and practices.
The result is not totalitarian repression but social equity,
spontaneous good order and generosity, and ceremonies maintaining
proper order among men and between the cosmic and human orders. (MOF,
81)
It was to the Ceremonies of Zhou
and other real and imagined Zhou precedents that Wang now turned to
guide a series of far-reaching policy initiatives. ... Several different
kinds of coins, some of them replicating the knife and spade shapes of
some of the late Zhou states, were instituted and made compulsory for
certain transactions; it seems clear that the proportion of
valuable metal in some of the new coins was lower than in the previous
Han coinage, and that this was in fact a debasement of the coinage.
Most people refused to accept the new coins, and the policy was widely
resented. ...
Most
important of all was his proclamation that henceforth there would be no
private landholding; all land would be known as the king’s fields
and would be subject to confiscation and redistribution. Immediately,
rich families having more than one hundred mou
(about thirty-three acres) of land were to distribute the excess over
that amount to their distant relatives or neighbors. Slaves were not
freed, but it was forbidden to buy or sell them. Wang justified these
measures as first steps toward the restoration of the well-field
system, which he said had been inhumanely destroyed by the Qin.
Little is known about what measures were taken to
enforce this remarkably sweeping change. We are told that the buying
and selling of slaves was pretty effectively disrupted. It also is
clear that these measures aroused the opposition of the entire landed
elite. Wang was forced to rescind them in 12 C.E. (MOF, 85) |
Ban [Gu]’s account of Wang’s last years shows an
increasingly tyrannical government, arresting thousands of people for
violating the monopoly on minting coins, conducting executions the year
round (in gross violation of the harmony of Heaven and humanity, which
restricted them to autumn, the season when the natural world dies).
Wang is shown as more and more out of touch, not wanting to hear about
rebel advances, but refusing to allow his commanders to mobilize or
move their troops on their own initiative. Pursuing the lore of omens
and correspondences that had justified his seizure of power, in 21 he
ordered a wide search in the empire for women to enter his household:
“Because the Yellow Lord had 120 women, he became an
immortal.” He also
sent men to violate the temple of Emperor Gao of the Han, chopping up
its doors and windows, whipping its walls with the whips used to whip
criminals. He spent vast sums on splendid ceremonies at the temples of
his ancestors; he had come a long way from the times when he did not
eat meat if there was hunger anywhere in the empire. Even in these late
years, however, Ban records one case in which Wang paid attention to a
comprehensive denunciation of his policies and followed one part of its
recommendations. The monopolies were abolished, but at the end of 22,
much too late. (MOF, 88)
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A massive flood of the Yellow River delivered the
fatal blow to [Wang Mang’s] short-lived government. ... The river’s
original course had been south of the Shandong peninsula, reaching the
sea near what is now the modern city of Tianjin. But during the floods
the river formed two arms, one flowing south of the Shandong peninsula
and the other flowing north. The resulting flooding displaced thousands
of peasants who rose up against the central government. Because the
rebels painted their foreheads red in hopes of gaining the increased
energy of red blood, they were called the Red Eyebrows. A loose
coalition of powerful landowning families joined together to suppress
the rebels, and after they had defeated both the rebels and the
imperial troops, they agreed to place a distant heir of the Han founder
on the throne. The coalition forces killed Wang Mang in 23 C.E., but
they gained full control only in 25 C.E., when the new emperor ordered
the capital moved to Luoyang, which served as the capital until 190 C.E.
The newly restored dynasty was able to govern
only with the cooperation of influential families who had supported its
return to power. Accordingly, it took no measures against the families
who amassed enormous estates and who regularly placed their sons in
office, often by recommending them to local officials. As the Han
dynasty entered its third and fourth centuries in power, eunuchs came
to play an increasingly important role. Apprehensive about the eunuchs’
influence in the Qin dynasty, the early Han emperors had largely
succeeded in keeping them from exercising power for the first two
centuries of the dynasty. This pattern changed in 92 C.E., however,
when the reigning emperor enlisted the support of a eunuch against a
powerful faction, and eunuchs often appear as major players in the
political intrigues of the second century. (OE, 126-127)
The Yellow Turban Rebellion
184 CE
 The
minimal information known about the Yellow Turbans reflects the point
of view of official historians who saw these Daoists as dangerous
insurrectionists, named for the yellow cloths they tied around their
heads. The Yellow Turbans shared many practices with the Five Peck
Daoists. Both groups considered illness a sign of wrongdoing, and both
encouraged the confession of sins. ... They claimed to inaugurate a new
age, which they called the “Era of Great Peace (taiping)” ... [and]
found support at different social levels, spanning the peasants in the
countryside, whose crops had been damaged by recent flooding of rivers,
and eunuchs within the palace. The Yellow Turbans planned their
rebellion for the third month of 184, but government officials
discovered their plot ahead of time. The arrest of one adept, who had
been in communication with some palace eunuchs, prompted all the
adherents to rebel ahead of schedule. One source reports that three hundred sixty thousand
insurgents from eight provinces joined the movement. The central government
dispatched its own imperial troops, and it recruited the armies of
several independent generals, including a former chancellor named Cao Cao
(155-220). The Daoist rebels proved no match for the combined forces,
who captured and killed all the important leaders by the end of 184. ...
The Yellow Turban uprisings rattled the palace leadership. Emperor Huan
was the last emperor to act on his own, and his decision to use eunuchs
to attack the consort family of the Liangs ushered in decades of
conflict between eunuchs and consort families in which the child
emperors played no role at all. After Emperor Huan died in 168, three
more emperors came to the throne, but each one was placed there by
powerful consort families, who challenged the eunuchs at their
peril. ... In 192, Cao Cao, the general who had suppressed the Yellow
Turbans, became regent. General Cao Cao went on to become one of the
most famous generals in Chinese history and one of the leading
protagonists of the great Chinese novel, Three Kingdoms
(written in the fifteenth or sixteenth century), yet he never gained
control of more than one-third of the empire. When Cao Cao died in 220,
the Han-dynasty puppet-emperor was still in place, but he was forced to
abdicate by Cao’s son, who proclaimed himself the founder of a new
dynasty. Three centuries of disunity ensued. (OE, 135-136)
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[I]f
we want to understand the place of the Three Kingdoms in the Chinese
sense of the past, we must focus not on the historical record but on
the Romance of the Three Kingdoms,
which follows a historically verifiable outline but leaves out much
that can be known and adds elaborate and wonderful stories that have
little or no foundation in sources available to us. As so often happens
in historical fiction or drama, institutions, trends, and complexities
are slighted, the focus on individual character and action becomes
stronger, and there is a tendency to clearer distinctions between
heroes and villains than can usually be found in political reality. But
there still is plenty of room for portrayal of conflicts between
private and public commitments, for heroes laid low by the faults of
their virtues or by the faults of those whom they are bound by ties of
sworn brotherhood. (MOF, 103-104)
 In the long, complex development of the novel, the characters of the heroes
are gradually revealed. Liu Bei, by his membership in the imperial
family the “elder brother” and eventual claimant of the Han succession,
is shown to be a paragon of conscientiousness, scruple, and generosity,
who would have been truly sagely as the third emperor of a great
dynasty but lacks the guile and ruthlessness required to rebuild the
fortunes of the Han. Zhang
Fei is the first of a long line in Chinese fiction of short-tempered,
loud-mouthed, good-hearted warriors who will cause a great deal of
trouble for their associates if not carefully watched; for the reader
or hearer, he is good for a laugh, a release of fantasies of
uncontrolled anger, yelling and fighting, instant and guileless redress
of wrongs. Guan Yu, by far the most interesting
of the three, is another warrior, fearless in battle, more controlled
and a better counselor than Zhang, above all a man who will defend his
own honor and will honor at all costs his obligations to others. His
red-faced, beautifully bearded statue stands today in many temples and
house shrines; he has become Lord Guan (Guan Di, Guan Gong), the God of
War in Chinese popular religion. (MOF, 105)
Zhuge Liang
Liu Bei’s General & Daoist Master of Nature
Liu
Bei and his sworn brothers now set out to find men who can advise them
how to strengthen their position in the middle Yangzi. They are told
repeatedly of a mysterious person named Zhuge Liang, whose main concern
is the Daoist pursuit of immortality and the secrets of nature, but who
also is wonderfully well versed in the great strategists of the Warring
States period. Twice they go to the small thatched house where the
great man lives, only to find that he is off in the mountains
somewhere. When they come a third time, he is at home but is taking a
nap. Liu Bei stands respectfully waiting for him to awaken, while Zhang
Fei becomes livid with rage and suggests awakening him by setting fire
to his thatched roof. When Zhuge Liang finally awakens he is all
politeness and apology. He appears to be “singularly tall, with a face
like gleaming jade, a plaited silken band around his head. Cloaked in
crane down, he had the buoyant air of a [Daoist] spiritual
transcendent.”
Soon he and Liu Bei settle down to serious discussion of
strategy. Zhuge Liang has a map, which shows the importance of taking
Jingzhou as a strategic base and the possibility of moving from there
up the river into Shu. Liu Bei is delighted, and Zhuge Liang abandons
his spiritual pursuits to become Liu’s strategic adviser. Guan Yu and
Zhang Fei remain suspicious, especially as it becomes clear that Zhuge
Liang will devise his strategies from a tent at headquarters and will
not lead troops into battle. Liu explains that “For brains I have
Kongming [the courtesy name frequently used for Zhuge Liang in the Romance],
for courage you two. They cannot be interchanged. ... Plans evolved
within the tent decide victory a thousand leagues away.”
Zhou
Yu [minister of Wu in the south] now is committed to resistance against
Cao Cao [ruler of Wei in the north] but is repeatedly astonished by
Zhuge Liang’s ability to see through complicated situations, anticipate
what would happen next, and stay three steps ahead of his rivals in his
plans. Finding him too dangerous a rival for power in the new alliance,
he seeks a way to do away with him without incurring the wrath of Sun
Quan [ruler of Wu] and Liu Bei [ruler of Shu Han]. He asks him if he
can provide 100,000 arrows for the coming battles. Zhuge Liang replies,
astonishingly, that he can do so within three days, and would accept
the death penalty if he did not fulfill his promise. Then he asks
another commander to provide “twenty vessels with a crew of thirty
each.
Lined up on either side of each vessel I want a thousand bales of
straw wrapped in black cloth. But if you tell Zhou Yu this time my plan
will fail.” On the third night there is a thick fog on the river which
Zhuge Liang, master of natural lore, has anticipated. He has the ships
pass Cao’s camp in single file, the crews shouting and beating the
drums as loudly as they can. Cao’s archers shoot as rapidly as they can
at the sources of the menacing sounds in the fog. As the fog lifts in
the morning, the vessels pass again at a greater distance, their crews
shouting their thanks to Cao Cao for donating such a fine supply of
arrows to his enemies. (MOF, 108)
The Sun-Liu alliance, its forces inferior in numbers and arms, now
prepares large numbers of ships full of wood, straw, and explosives to
be sent drifting down into Cao’s anchored ships. To make sure that the
Cao fleet cannot get away, they send a double agent to Cao, who advises
that he can deal with the seasickness his northern soldiers are
suffering on their ships by chaining the ships together so that they
will not move so much in the water. The double agent, something of an
artist with his three inches of limber tongue, convinces Cao. Cao knows
of the fireships being prepared southeast of his base, and at that time
of year the prevailing winds are from the north and west.
Now it is time for Zhuge Liang to
demonstrate his mastery of the secrets of summoning the powers of
nature. He has a three-tiered altar built. On the bottom tier are
twenty-eight flags for the twenty-eight solar mansions, on the next
sixty-four flags for the hexagrams of the Yi jing,
on the top four men dressed in the colors appropriate to the four
directions. In the robes of a Daoist priest, barefoot, long hair loose
down his back, Zhuge Liang ascends and descends his altar, in silent
prayer. Soon a wind begins to rise out of the southeast. The fire ships
are lit and set adrift. They bear down on Cao’s base like flaming
arrows. It is too late to try to loosen the chains that fasten all the
ships. The fire spreads rapidly from one to another, and all are lost. (MOF, 110)
Liu
Bei dies , and Zhuge Liang manages the peaceful succession of his son.
He tries to do the best he can pursuing the Han cause in face of the
isolation of the Shu Han regime and the mediocrity of the successor. He
makes some progress in the Han River valley, but has to retreat to the
city of Hanzhong after a serious defeat. Seeing vastly superior Wei
forces approaching, he has the main gates of the city opened and twenty
men placed at each to sweep the road. Zhuge Liang himself puts his
white scarf around his head, his crane feather cloak around his
shoulders, and sits on the city wall with two boys, playing a qin,
a stringed instrument. The Wei general, convinced that Zhuge Liang
never takes chances and knowing his skill in setting traps, looks at
this astonishing spectacle and orders a general retreat. Zhuge Liang
drives on into Wei River valley, but an attack on the enemy using
burning wheels sent rolling down hillsides to block a pass fails when a
sudden rainstorm puts the fires out. Heaven is turning against him.
Zhuge Liang is exhausted from trying to make all the plans and
decisions. His vitality is at low ebb. He has soldiers with black flags
stand around his tent while he prays to the Northern Dipper, asking
that his life be prolonged for the sake of the Han cause. If the lamp
in his tent stays lit for seven days, he may have gained a year of
life. But on the sixth night a soldier dashes in, accidentally kicks
over the lamp, and it is extinguished. Zhuge Liang now dictates his
deathbed memorial to his emperor:
| “I humbly beg that Your Majesty keep
an honest mind and limit your desires, disciplining yourself and caring
tenderly for the people. Serve the late Emperor in a spirit of filial
piety; show humane generosity throughout your kingdom. Promote those
not in the public eye to advance the cause of true excellence; deny
access to the vicious and depraved to strengthen the moral tone of the
realm.” |
He also orders that after his death
there is to be no outcry of mourning, for the enemy will be watching.
He has had a life-size figure of himself carved of wood; it is to be
put in a chariot and sent out the next day at the head of the Shu Han
army. After his death, his orders are followed. The Wei forces see his
figure in the chariot, think he is still alive, and flee. (MOF, 111-112)
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novel continues to the Jin reunification of 280, ending with a
repetition of its first sentence about the alternation of unity and
disunity, but it seems to me that Zhuge Liang’s last trick, his
cheating of death itself, is the real conclusion of the story, and one
of the finest evocations in Chinese literature of the power of fame, of
a great name, to outlive death and even to turn the tide of war. (MOF,
112-113) |
Is this History? Literature? Both?
Epilogue
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