The Gentle Emperor

Panel 01: The man who put the Han back on its throne spent the rest of his life making the throne smaller. He merged four hundred counties, stood the levies down, sent his marquises off to their estates, refused the army his own officers were begging him to lead into the west, and told his family over the wine that he meant to govern by softness. — The man who put the Han back on its throne spent the rest of his life making the throne smaller. He merged four hundred counties, stood the levies down, sent his marquises off to their estates, refused the army his own officers were begging him to lead into the west, and told his family over the wine that he meant to govern by softness.

01 / 18 Note

This episode is told from the Book of the Later Han: the two halves of the emperor's own annal, then the memoirs of the men and women in it — Deng Yu, Feng Yi and Cen Peng, Wu Han, the officers of the Hebei flight, Song Hong, Huan Tan, Zheng Xing, the empresses, the Western Regions. The ritual decisions and the census come from the treatises, which are Sima Biao's continuation of the dynasty's history, bound into this book; the court history of the day, the Eastern Wing's records, is used only where the commentaries quote it. The Zizhi Tongjian is a relay of these pages and is never a second witness. The later popular novels of the restoration appear only in the myth checks, where they are the thing being checked.

On our sources

Panel 02: He was the ninth-generation grandson of the dynasty's founder through a king of Changsha nobody had counted on, and the son of a small county chief; his father died when the boy was nine and an uncle raised him. The annal gives him a tall man's height, fine whiskers, a large mouth, a prominent nose and a forehead like the sun. He minded the ploughs himself. — He was the ninth-generation grandson of the dynasty's founder through a king of Changsha nobody had counted on, and the son of a small county chief; his father died when the boy was nine and an uncle raised him. The annal gives him a tall man's height, fine whiskers, a large mouth, a prominent nose and a forehead like the sun. He minded the ploughs himself.

Panel 03: A man of Wan named Li Tong came to him with a prophecy book and a line made to be believed: the house of Liu will rise again, and the house of Li will be the pole it rises on. Liu Xiu did not dare, then thought about his brother's house full of reckless guests, and bought crossbows. In the tenth month of 22 CE he rose at Wan, aged twenty-eight. — A man of Wan named Li Tong came to him with a prophecy book and a line made to be believed: the house of Liu will rise again, and the house of Li will be the pole it rises on. Liu Xiu did not dare, then thought about his brother's house full of reckless guests, and bought crossbows. In the tenth month of 22 CE he rose at Wan, aged twenty-eight.

03 / 18 In the sources

The record of his start is a record of persuasion, not of enthusiasm: the annal says he at first did not accept it, and only weighed that his brother would certainly raise something great and that Wang Mang's ruin was already visible. The young men of the clan hid when they heard the rising had begun, saying Bo Sheng is going to get us killed; then they saw Liu Xiu in the crimson robe and the tall cap of an officer and were startled into settling down — even the careful one is doing it. He began on an ox, and got a horse only by killing the commandant of Xinye. When the loot was shared out unevenly and the crowd turned on the Liu family, he collected what his own kinsmen had taken and gave that away too.

Hou Han shu, juan 1 upper

Panel 04: Wang Mang answered the loss of two armies with the last and largest host the dynasty could raise: a million marchers, forty-two thousand of them armoured, with officers trained by sixty-odd schools of theory, a giant a zhang tall, and tigers, leopards and rhinoceroses for the spectacle. Kunyang held eight or nine thousand men. In the sixth month of 23 CE Liu Xiu rode out at night with thirteen horse and came back with three thousand desperate men straight at the enemy's centre. — Wang Mang answered the loss of two armies with the last and largest host the dynasty could raise: a million marchers, forty-two thousand of them armoured, with officers trained by sixty-odd schools of theory, a giant a zhang tall, and tigers, leopards and rhinoceroses for the spectacle. Kunyang held eight or nine thousand men. In the sixth month of 23 CE Liu Xiu rode out at night with thirteen horse and came back with three thousand desperate men straight at the enemy's centre.

Panel 05: Within three months of Kunyang the emperor he was serving murdered his brother. Liu Xiu rode straight to the capital to apologize for it. He did not boast once about what he had done at Kunyang, he did not dare wear mourning, and he ate, drank and talked as he always had. His opponent was ashamed of it, and gave him a generalship and a marquisate. — Within three months of Kunyang the emperor he was serving murdered his brother. Liu Xiu rode straight to the capital to apologize for it. He did not boast once about what he had done at Kunyang, he did not dare wear mourning, and he ate, drank and talked as he always had. His opponent was ashamed of it, and gave him a generalship and a marquisate.

05 / 18 In the sources

The annal keeps all four of those facts in one sentence, which is the closest thing in the book to a portrait of how he thought: never to boast of the rank of Kunyang, never to mourn Bo Sheng, food and laughter as usual. In 39 CE he had the brothers named after death — Bo Sheng as the martial duke of Qi, the other elder brother as the pitiful duke of Lu — and in the spring of 41 CE he built a shrine for four generations of the Chongling line while his own clan women drank in the old house. He also, in the ninth month of 25 CE, issued an edict making it a capital crime to harm the deposed emperor Liu Xuan, whom he had only just enfeoffed as the king of Huaiyang.

Hou Han shu, juan 1 upper; juan 1 lower

Panel 06: He did not found the restored Han on a battlefield. He founded it in an office. Sent ahead to prepare the eastern capital for the regime he served, he appointed staff, wrote the memoranda, and inspected in the old forms exactly as the old forms required — and men who had laughed at the rising's generals in women's jackets wept at the sight of a correctly filled desk. — He did not found the restored Han on a battlefield. He founded it in an office. Sent ahead to prepare the eastern capital for the regime he served, he appointed staff, wrote the memoranda, and inspected in the old forms exactly as the old forms required — and men who had laughed at the rising's generals in women's jackets wept at the sight of a correctly filled desk.

Panel 07: A fortune-teller was proclaimed at Handan as the surviving son of a former emperor, and the man he was meant to replace put out a warrant: one hundred thousand households for Liu Xiu's capture. He travelled by night and by day and dared not enter any town, eating at the roadside; at Raoyang he walked into the post-house calling himself the Handan envoy, and got out again by walking slowly. — A fortune-teller was proclaimed at Handan as the surviving son of a former emperor, and the man he was meant to replace put out a warrant: one hundred thousand households for Liu Xiu's capture. He travelled by night and by day and dared not enter any town, eating at the roadside; at Raoyang he walked into the post-house calling himself the Handan envoy, and got out again by walking slowly.

07 / 18 In the sources

The annal does not spare this year: he slept by the road, his face split open by frost, and at the Hutuo river there were no boats and the ice took him only until a few carts went through and sank. Feng Yi's memoir adds the meals — bean porridge at the Wu Lou post-house in the cold, then wheat and turnip greens by a roofless shelter in the wind and rain — and says that twenty years later the emperor was still reciting the debt, that the porridge of the urgent days at Wulou and the wheat at the Hutuo had gone long unrepaid. The men who saved him were the minor officers of Xinhe and Shanggu and Yuyang, and the cavalry that arrived from the two northern commanderies under Wu Han and Kou Xun.

Hou Han shu, juan 1 upper; juan 17, Biography of Feng Yi; juan 21

Panel 08: Handan fell in the fifth month of 24 CE, and his clerks pulled out the archive: thousands of letters from his own officials and gentlemen of Hebei, written to the other side, most of them insulting him. He did not open one. He had them all burned in front of the assembled generals. — Handan fell in the fifth month of 24 CE, and his clerks pulled out the archive: thousands of letters from his own officials and gentlemen of Hebei, written to the other side, most of them insulting him. He did not open one. He had them all burned in front of the assembled generals.

08 / 18 In the sources

His word for it is in the annal: let the uneasy ones set themselves at ease. The same year the record gives the other half of his method. He would not fight the Bronze Horse bands when they challenged, cut their grain instead, and after he had surrounded and taken them he let each chief keep his own command, then rode alone through the ranks of men who had not yet been disarmed. They said of it that the Prince of Xiao puts his red heart into a man's belly — how then not to die for it — and he ended with several hundred thousand men, and the west of the pass called him the Bronze Horse emperor. In the same year he was very nearly killed at Shunshui on horseback, and the army believed him dead for days.

Hou Han shu, juan 1 upper

Panel 09: At Hao a man who had once shared a college room with him in the capital rode out of the pass with a prophetic book in his hand: Liu Xiu raises troops to arrest the unprincipled, the four barbarians gather like clouds and dragons fight in the fields, at the four-and-seven moment fire is master. On a day marked ji wei in the sixth month of 25 CE he built an altar south of Hao and told Heaven he was taking the empire. — At Hao a man who had once shared a college room with him in the capital rode out of the pass with a prophetic book in his hand: Liu Xiu raises troops to arrest the unprincipled, the four barbarians gather like clouds and dragons fight in the fields, at the four-and-seven moment fire is master. On a day marked ji wei in the sixth month of 25 CE he built an altar south of Hao and told Heaven he was taking the empire.

09 / 18 In the sources

The prayer is preserved in full, and it is an argument, not a eulogy: he repeats what his ministers asserted, that Wang Mang seized the throne and he rose in anger, that he broke Wang Xun and Wang Yi at Kunyang and killed Wang Lang and absorbed the Bronze Horse bands, and then it quotes a chart-text, Liu Xiu raises troops to arrest the unprincipled, Mao Jin cultivates virtue and becomes Son of Heaven — Mao Jin being the house name Liu written out in its parts. He refuses three times, as the protocol required, and accepts. The year-name became Jianwu, the first martial, and the town of Hao was renamed Gaoyi, the high town. The same month the Red Eyebrows set up their own puppet; the empire he describes as pacified was, on the day he said it, four-way civil war.

Hou Han shu, juan 1 upper; juan 97, Treatise on Sacrifices, upper

Panel 10: The founding of the eastern capital takes one sentence in the emperor's own annal: in the winter, in the tenth month, his carriage entered Luoyang, he lodged in the Quefei hall of the southern palace, and it was settled as the capital. He was thirty-one by the arithmetic of his own record, and he never went back to Chang'an to live. — The founding of the eastern capital takes one sentence in the emperor's own annal: in the winter, in the tenth month, his carriage entered Luoyang, he lodged in the Quefei hall of the southern palace, and it was settled as the capital. He was thirty-one by the arithmetic of his own record, and he never went back to Chang'an to live.

10 / 18 In the sources

Everything the annal says about the choice is a date and a hall. It does not rename the city and it does not call it the eastern capital — that usage is later. The circumstances were the ones he did not advertise: the old capital's palaces had been burned and its graves dug up by the Red Eyebrows, the eleven former emperors' spirit tablets had to be carried east by Deng Yu's staff, and the granary road he now needed ran along the Yellow River valley, where he already held the offices. His ministers in the same month were a twenty-four-year-old as Grand Minister over the Masses with a fief of ten thousand households, a horse-dealer as Marshal-in-Chief, and a district official of Yewang as Grand Minister of Works; the old man made Senior Grand Tutor had once been a county clerk.

Hou Han shu, juan 1 upper; juan 16, Biography of Deng Yu

Panel 11: In the first month of 26 CE he made every one of his captains a marquis, and the greatest of them the lords of four counties — four times the size an old schoolman thought lawful. He warned them in the same breath that a man satisfied is a man ruined, and told them to be as one who looks down into an abyss and walks on thin ice. — In the first month of 26 CE he made every one of his captains a marquis, and the greatest of them the lords of four counties — four times the size an old schoolman thought lawful. He warned them in the same breath that a man satisfied is a man ruined, and told them to be as one who looks down into an abyss and walks on thin ice.

11 / 18 Debated

He answered the academician with the sentence that is the whole settlement: of old, states were lost through a lack of principle, and no one ever heard of a state perishing because its meritorious officials had too much land. The seals were handed over the same day, and the investiture document told the marquises to be haughty without danger and full without overflowing, and to hand the fief down as a barrier for Han. Read against the rest of the reign, though, the bargain was never felt as fair by anyone: Huan Tan's memorial says the rewards and grants were thin and that the empire was not settled in time because of it; the governor of Yuyang rebelled in 26 CE on the ground that he and his colleague had done equal service and been paid equally little; and Ma Yuan, given a whole large county for the south, wrote that Lu Bode had opened seven commanderies and been given only a few hundred households, and asked how so little merit could carry so thick a reward for long.

Hou Han shu, juan 1 upper; juan 28 upper, Biography of Huan Tan; juan 12; juan 24, Biography of Ma Yuan

Panel 12: In 30 CE he ordered the empire counted and cut. His own edict said the reason offices exist is to serve the people, and that with the households wasted and gone the county staffs were still too thick; the ministers folded four hundred and odd counties into others and kept one official in ten. That same year the commandery commandants who drilled the annual levies were abolished, and the marquises were told to go and live on their estates. — In 30 CE he ordered the empire counted and cut. His own edict said the reason offices exist is to serve the people, and that with the households wasted and gone the county staffs were still too thick; the ministers folded four hundred and odd counties into others and kept one official in ten. That same year the commandery commandants who drilled the annual levies were abolished, and the marquises were told to go and live on their estates.

12 / 18 In the sources

The list is a policy, and it is in the annal year by year: the demobilisation edict of 31 CE sent the light chariots, the horse, the material officers and the naval men back to the ranks of the common people; the land tax in 30 CE was put back at one part in thirty, which had been the settled Western Han rate and not the wartime tenth; in 37 CE four kings of the blood were demoted to marquises because their rank did not accord with the classics, and with them the whole roll of one hundred and thirty-odd prince's sons and heirless marquises, while three more kings were stepped down to dukes; in 42 CE the provincial governors were struck and the inspectors put back; in 50 CE the emoluments of every post of a thousand shi and above were cut below the Western Han rates, and those below them raised. The treatise of commanderies and kingdoms says of its own list that every county named in the earlier book and missing here was merged away by this emperor.

Hou Han shu, juan 1 lower; juan 109, Treatise on Commanderies and Kingdoms

Panel 13: In 50 CE he ordered his own burial mound, and the minister of works proposed the usual sacred acres. The emperor refused: the ancient kings buried with clay figures and tiled vessels, a wooden chariot and a thatched horse, so that later ages would not know where they lay. His ground was to be two or three hundred mu, with no hill on it and no more ponds than let the water run off. — In 50 CE he ordered his own burial mound, and the minister of works proposed the usual sacred acres. The emperor refused: the ancient kings buried with clay figures and tiled vessels, a wooden chariot and a thatched horse, so that later ages would not know where they lay. His ground was to be two or three hundred mu, with no hill on it and no more ponds than let the water run off.

Panel 14: He went back to the village where he had grown up in the spring of 41 CE, repaired the garden and the temple, sacrificed at the old house, and sat drinking with his own people. The aunts who had brought him up got merry and said: when Wen Shu was young he was careful and honest, cold to other people, nothing but plain and soft — and now he has come to this. He laughed out loud and said what he meant. — He went back to the village where he had grown up in the spring of 41 CE, repaired the garden and the temple, sacrificed at the old house, and sat drinking with his own people. The aunts who had brought him up got merry and said: when Wen Shu was young he was careful and honest, cold to other people, nothing but plain and soft — and now he has come to this. He laughed out loud and said what he meant.

14 / 18 In the sources

The phrase is his own, ruo dao, the soft way, and the annal sets it beside the family shrine he then built for every branch of the Chongling Liu. What the record actually documents, though, is legislation rather than temper. In 26 CE people who had sold a wife or a child to keep alive were declared free to go home to their parents and anyone who held them was to be prosecuted; in 28 CE no clerk under six hundred shi could be imprisoned without a prior report, and no man of eighty or boy of ten or woman implicated by her husband could be put in chains; in 35 CE the edict said that among the natures of heaven and earth man is the precious thing, and that those who killed their slaves and bond-servants should not have their sentences cut for it; in 31 CE he ordered that memorials to him must not call him sage. In the same spring of 41 CE he deposed Empress Guo to be the queen dowager of Zhongshan and made the lady Yin empress, and his historian noticed that this, too, was handled so that later ages could see no gap between the thick and the thin of his treatment.

Hou Han shu, juan 1 upper and lower; juan 10 upper, Annals of the Empresses

Panel 15: In the summer of 39 CE he ordered every province and commandery to verify the acres under plough, the households and their ages, and to check up on the second-rank governors who had been crooked and unfair about it. Two of his own Grand Ministers over the Masses died in that business within eighteen months — one dismissed and by his own hand, one in chains — and in the ninth month of 40 CE the governor of the capital commandery and ten-odd more went to prison and died there for the numbers. — In the summer of 39 CE he ordered every province and commandery to verify the acres under plough, the households and their ages, and to check up on the second-rank governors who had been crooked and unfair about it. Two of his own Grand Ministers over the Masses died in that business within eighteen months — one dismissed and by his own hand, one in chains — and in the ninth month of 40 CE the governor of the capital commandery and ten-odd more went to prison and died there for the numbers.

15 / 18 In the sources

The charge against them in the annal is four characters: the audit was not done truthfully. Then the land answered. The great families of the commanderies, the men who held the local soldiers, and the ordinary bandits rose everywhere in the same months, hurting and killing the chiefs of offices, and when the authorities came they scattered and when the authorities left they massed again; the annal names the four provinces of the east and north as the worst. The court did not send an army. It sent a proclamation: five bandits who cut down one of their number went free; officers who had hung back or let them go deliberately were not to be charged; a local chief who simply failed to catch them was not blamed, and only those who hid the fact were punished. The chiefs were then transplanted to another commandery, given fields and a ration, and told to settle down to live.

Hou Han shu, juan 1 lower

Panel 16: The oasis kings came back to him in 38 CE and the road opened again; in 41 CE the greatest of them asked to be made Han's protector of the west, and the seal was on its way out before a frontier governor at Dunhuang argued that you cannot lend the barbarians that much power and forced the court to take it back. In the winter of 45 CE sixteen of them sent their sons in hostage and asked for a protector, weeping and bowing their heads to the ground. He sent the boys home with rich presents. — The oasis kings came back to him in 38 CE and the road opened again; in 41 CE the greatest of them asked to be made Han's protector of the west, and the seal was on its way out before a frontier governor at Dunhuang argued that you cannot lend the barbarians that much power and forced the court to take it back. In the winter of 45 CE sixteen of them sent their sons in hostage and asked for a protector, weeping and bowing their heads to the ground. He sent the boys home with rich presents.

16 / 18 In the sources

The annal's reason for refusing is six characters: the middle regions had but newly settled, and there was no leisure for affairs outside them. The Western Regions memoir tells the same refusal with the numbers wrong — eighteen kings instead of sixteen — and gives the sequel: the king of Shache went on attacking, killed and carried off over a thousand people at Shanshan, and when the answer came back as above, Shanshan and the Tangut lands of the Turfan oasis went over to the Xiongnu again. The memoir ends the account with its own arithmetic: the Western Regions were severed from us for sixty-five years and then reopened. The reopening is the next life but one, and the man who did it was a copy-clerk with thirty-six companions.

Hou Han shu, juan 1 lower; juan 88, Memoir of the Western Regions

Panel 17: In 54 CE his ministers said thirty years of reign deserved the sealing and the sacrifice at Tai Shan, and he wrote back that after thirty years on the throne the people's resentment was full in their bellies, and that if any commandery or state sent an official from far away to offer congratulations with inflated praise he would have the man's head shaved and sent to work a garrison farm. Nobody dared raise it again for two years. Then he read a prophecy book one night while he was fasting. — In 54 CE his ministers said thirty years of reign deserved the sealing and the sacrifice at Tai Shan, and he wrote back that after thirty years on the throne the people's resentment was full in their bellies, and that if any commandery or state sent an official from far away to offer congratulations with inflated praise he would have the man's head shaved and sent to work a garrison farm. Nobody dared raise it again for two years. Then he read a prophecy book one night while he was fasting.

17 / 18 In the sources

The text was the chart of the meeting at Mount Tai, which promised the fortune of the red Liu's ninth generation on that mountain, and the annal says he was moved by it: he ordered his officers to go back through the river and Luo charts for anything about a ninth-generation封禅, they reported findings, and he agreed. In the second month of 56 CE he burned the sacrifice facing Tai Shan, climbed and sealed it, and made the rite at Liangfu below; the stone inscription cut that spring is preserved and it quotes the chart lines, including the one that had brought him the throne. The same year he built the Bright Hall, the Spirit Terrace and the Round College, and — the annal's sentence, of 56 CE — he promulgated the charts and the apocrypha to the whole realm. When he asked Huan Tan where the Spirit Terrace should go and said he meant to decide it by the apocrypha, Tan said after a long silence that he did not read them, then went on at length that they were not classics; the emperor called that slandering the sages and having no law and was about to have him beheaded, and Tan's forehead bled on the tiles before he was let go, and he died of illness on the road to his post in Lu'an. Zheng Xing, asked the same question about the suburban sacrifice, answered I do not read them and was forgiven; the memoir adds the consequence: he spoke often on public affairs and always out of the classics, and because he was not good at the apocrypha he was never given the highest employments. Chen Yuan said the same thing about a book: the Zuo tradition was taken up by his own judgment, and dropped halfway because its masters did not understand the charts.

Hou Han shu, juan 1 lower; juan 97, Treatise on Sacrifices, upper; juan 28 upper, Biography of Huan Tan; juan 36

Panel 18: He died in the second month of 57 CE in the front hall of the southern palace, sixty-two by his own annal, and left the empire to the son Lady Yin had borne him. His historian found the man worn out with war and knowing that the world was spent, and having after the pacification of Long and Shu never spoken of military affairs again unless something pressed. — He died in the second month of 57 CE in the front hall of the southern palace, sixty-two by his own annal, and left the empire to the son Lady Yin had borne him. His historian found the man worn out with war and knowing that the world was spent, and having after the pacification of Long and Shu never spoken of military affairs again unless something pressed.

18 / 18 Commentary

The annal's closing judgment is the settlement itself in five words and five more: the meritorious officials put back, the document officers brought forward, the bows and arrows put away and the horses and oxen turned out — the war that stops war. His son asked him once about formations and got the answer that a duke of Wei once asked Confucius the same and did not get it, and that this was not his son's concern; and asked not to work from dawn until the sun went west every single day on his health, he said he liked it and did not find it tiring. Two records of what that left. The treatise of commanderies and kingdoms gives the count of 57 CE: four million two hundred seventy-one thousand six hundred and thirty-four households, and twenty-one million seven thousand eight hundred and twenty mouths, with its own verdict on the hundred years of Wang Mang and the wars that the people were wasted and of ten only two remained; one printed form of that figure has three where the standard collation reads two. And Zhong Changtong, writing two generations after the collapse: the emperor grieved at the loss of power by several reigns and hated the strong minister's theft of the mandate, so he corrected the crooked past the straight, put no trust in what was below him, and though he appointed the three ministers, the business went to the terrace offices; the ministers were only there to be blamed. Power then moved to the families of empresses and to the attendants near the person — and of the first of those families, the ten-thousand-household marquis of 24 CE had been the ancestor of the men who sat in the palace and chose an emperor in 106 CE.

Hou Han shu, juan 1 lower; juan 109, Treatise on Commanderies and Kingdoms; juan 49, Biography of Zhong Changtong; juan 16

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