Regular Attendant, the man the emperor said was his lord. When the capital's plot was found out the emperor turned on the Regular Attendants, and Zhang Rang and his fellows went bareheaded and barefoot, paid their private wealth into the war, and were left in office; the officer who pressed for their deaths died in prison on a charge worked up against him.
From that day the emperor's hand was in their hands: the appointments, the pardons and the punishments of the empire came out of the inner court, and whoever complained of it was told he kept a party.the Hou Han shu's judgment on the eunuch lords after the rising of 184; Hou Han shu, juan 78, Memoir of the Eunuchs — the historian's evaluation of him, not a speech
Appears in
Relations
- Li Ying enemies — The lists that damned him also named the men he outlived; he held the boy emperor's ear for twenty years after the second prohibition killed them.
- Huangfu Song enemies — He is the inner court behind the accusation that cost the saviour of the war his marquisate, twice.
- Lu Zhi enemies — The court that took Lu Zhi's command in chains was the court his ring held.
Myth vs record
A castrated demon who enchanted the emperor, and the eunuchs' power was pure manipulation of a puppet throne.
The histories make him the ablest of the inner court's men, and the emperor's own recorded phrase about him and his colleague is the truth of the relationship reversed: the throne said a certain Changshi was its father. When the rising of 184 broke, the emperor blamed the inner court and the ring threw itself on the empress dowager's intercession — bribed its way out of the purge that began with the arrests — and after that the court gave them its ear. He died in the spring of 189 in the palace coup that wiped his ring out, and his ring's killing of the general-in-chief brought a frontier army to the capital behind him.