The age's greatest scholar of texts and the New's Teaching Master of the State, the man who wrote its ceremonies. An open indictment named him as the one who had inverted the Five Classics; he took his own life after a plot.
The Teaching Master of the State had inverted the Five Classics and made the scholars unsure — execute this few, and comfort the empire.Not his words: Gongsun Lu's open indictment of the New's ministers named him first — Hanshu, juan 99 lower
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- Wang Mang colleagues — He was the age's greatest scholar of texts and the New's Teaching Master of the State, the man who wrote its ceremonies; and in the same year the empire came apart he plotted to hand the capital back to the Han and took his own life. Mang hated the scandal of an inner quarrel and hid the manner of their deaths.
Myth vs record
The man who wrote the New dynasty's rituals went down loyally with it, a scholar's martyr to the throne that had taken his own clan's empire.
He served that throne for over a decade and then plotted against it, and the record preserves both halves without stitching them into a motive. An old general had already asked publicly for his head, naming him as the one who had inverted the Five Classics and made the scholars unsure; Mang was furious, had the man led out, and then took part of what he said. When the scholar's own plot failed in 23 CE he killed himself with a general of the guard, and the book's point about the cover-up is not about loyalty but about appearances: the emperor could not bear the scandal of an inner quarrel, so he hid how they died.