Grand general of the imperial in-laws. Rode five thousand li past the Altai to the Yanran Mountain and cut his victory in stone — and fell three years later, with the man who wrote that inscription, Ban Gu, dead in gaol.
Send me out against the Xiongnu to ransom what I have done. Let me die on the steppe rather than be examined for it in the capital.Dou Xian's petition, made after his retainers had killed Liang Hou, a marquis of the imperial household, and repeated in 92 CE when he asked to be sent north against the Xiongnu to redeem his guilt; Hou Han shu, juan 23, Hereditary Biography of Dou Rong — rendered in compressed form, the memoir's substance and not its sentence
Appears in
Relations
- Ban Gu patron — He gave Ban Gu his staff and his subject: the words cut at the Yanran Mountain are Gu's, and the gaol that killed Gu followed Xian's fall within the year.
- Ban Chao colleagues — The two arms of the same settlement: Xian broke the Northern Court's chanyu on the steppe in 89 while Chao took back the lanes, and Chao outlived him by ten years.
- Dou Wu successor — The same house of imperial in-laws was regent twice and destroyed twice, by the throne's own coup in 92 and again in 168.
Myth vs record
Dou Xian was a noble conqueror struck down by a suspicious young emperor, and the man who sealed Mount Yanran died in the field.
He came home alive and died disgraced. The campaign of 89 was the deepest reach any Han army is recorded making north of the desert — five thousand li beyond the wall, five columns out of the border passes — and the victory won him a marquisate; but he had a murdered envoy in his household, would not give up his seat at court, and in 92 the boy emperor Zhang shut the gates and stripped him. His stele outlasted him by nineteen centuries: the stone was found again in Mongolia only in 1990.