Zhang Jue's chief of one great battalion, who gathered tens of thousands out of Jing and Yang for a junction at Ye, came and went to the capital and took two Regular Attendants at the emperor's elbow as his men inside it, and was torn apart by teams at Luoyang when a fellow disciple gave the whole arrangement away.
For years he had been drawing the officials of the southern commanderies over; now he led tens of thousands of the disciples of Jing and Yang toward the capital, with men inside the palace to open the gates for him.the Hou Han shu's account of Ma Yuanyi's commission in the Yellow Turban plot of 184 CE, the memoirs' narrative about him and not his own words; Hou Han shu, Memoir of Huangfu Song; juan 78, Memoir of the Eunuchs
Appears in
Relations
- Zhang Jue colleagues — Zhang Jue's grand-officer for the south, and the movement's only recorded line into the capital's inner court.
Myth vs record
The rising was a spontaneous explosion of desperate peasants, which is why it startled the court.
It had a man in Luoyang with a purse. Ma Yuanyi's work — years of recruiting in the south and east, then the march of the southern disciples north to a junction, then Regular Attendant Feng Xu and the eunuch Xu Feng bought to open the city from inside — is what the record has instead of spontaneity. The rising went early because his own disciple Tang Zhou informed in the first month of 184, and the court spent three months of warning on it and still nearly fell. He was torn apart by teams in the capital's market, and the patrol lists went out from him.