by John Keay
In 5 BC the total number of bureaucrats serving in both central and local government was estimated at over 130,000. Office was open to those with the requisite education or attributes, and as is the way with civil services, all posts were graded into a hierarchical pecking order that cut across departmental divisions. Pay scales conformed to this grading, although the values given to each rank as expressed in ‘bushels’ were survivals from a coinless past and had little to do with current pay equivalents.
Not even the emperor’s several thousand concubines and handmaidens were exempt from the system. By the beginning of the first century AD they too had been bureaucratised with ranks equivalent to those in government. Thus a ‘Brilliant Companion’ enjoyed the same status as the Chancellor, who was one of the highest officials in the land with a ‘10,000 bushels’ ranking; a ‘Beautiful Lady’ was ranked at 2,000 bushels, a ‘Compliant Lady’ at 1,000 and a ‘Maid for All Purposes’ at 300. Mere ‘Night Attendants’ and ‘Soothing Maids’, at 100 bushels, held roughly the same rock-bottom rank as ‘Accessory Clerks’.
It was the same throughout the emperor’s household and those of the empress and the heir apparent. The ‘Prefect Grand Butcher’, his assistants and apprentices, forty-two in all, were also ranked, although their bloodied subordinates who did the actual cutting and dicing were not; in 70 BC, by way of an economy measure, the latter’s number was reduced to 272.16
Neither the butchers and other provisioners nor the women of the bedchamber were employed merely to gratify a gargantuan imperial appetite. Both served a dynastic function. The ladies carried a heavy responsibility for the future of the imperial lineage, while the provisioners supplied the needs of its past, their prime carcases and first pickings being destined as sacrificial offerings to the ancestors. Conspicuous extravagance was an accepted measure of majesty, for the dead as for the living. Ancestral shrines had their own staffs for attendance on the deceased and for the maintenance of the tombs and their surroundings. Whole tomb towns, endowed and populated for the purpose, sprang up in their vicinity. According to the Hanshu, by the time of Han Yuandi (49–33 BC), there were over 200 ancestral shrines tended by some 57,000 officials, at which, in the course of a year, 24,455 meals were ritually served.17
Faithful service or imperial favour might lead to an advance in rank, but rankings were not a sure guide to professional competence or influence, only to social status. For the able, the ambitious or the well endowed, the system itself provided a genuine chance of recognition. Patronage and nepotism, though normal, rarely resulted in a post becoming hereditary. Although Sima Qian, for instance, had succeeded his father as Grand Astrologer (the Han equivalent of Grand Diviner), this was thanks not to inheritance but to a paternal apprenticeship for this highly specialised function, ‘the most versatile and technically trained . . . in the entire central government’.18 (At the time, there was no such office as ‘Grand Historian’; the term, though adopted by the author of the Shiji, became a title with a ranked office only when Ban Gu was officially encouraged to undertake the authorship of the Han dynastic history (Hanshu) in the late first century ad.)
The hierarchy of rankings provided a bureaucratic framework, but individual titles, ranks and responsibilities, both in central government and local government, changed with bewildering frequency. Neat flow-charts showing the most senior ‘Three Excellencies’ (typically Chancellor, Commander-in-Chief and Grand Minister for Public Works) atop the ‘Nine Ministries’ (Master of Ceremonies, Superintendent of the Household, Commandant of Justice, various treasurers, etc.), with each ministry then branching into its various subordinate bureaux, can be misleading. The system was far from static. And responsibility was as often divided as delegated: for all officials were subject to vigilant scrutiny from a separate censorate, registry, auditor or inspector. Direction might come from above, but correction came from beside or even below. ‘Parallel administration’ was an accepted feature of government long before its reinvention by the Chinese Communist Party.
Sometimes a post would be shared by two officials; sometimes posts were paired, with an official ‘of the Left’ being matched by one ‘of the Right’. More typically whole hierarchies were duplicated. The ‘Prefect Grand Physician’ and his staff of assistants and pharmacists were observed by the ‘Inspector of the Grand Physician’ with his own staff of assisting, attending and apprentice physicians. In the commanderies and kingdoms, teams of inspectors, sometimes called ‘shepherds’, roamed their flocks with bated writing-brush as they scrutinised the local administrations in search of improprieties. Yet merit, no less than misdemeanours, had to be reported; failure to do so could result in the censors themselves being censured. It was a system of checks and balances, worthy in every way of a civilisation that would invent the world’s first mechanical timepiece.
The emperor himself was not exempt from correction. Confucius had been adamant that senior officials, possessed by definition of the highest moral character, were duty bound to admonish the emperor as well as advise him. They did so obliquely, often fearlessly, and sometimes to effect. For example, while Heaven might sound an ominous warning with flood and famine, it was up to local officials to report such occurrences, ministries to mitigate them, astrologers and others to interpret them, and senior counsellors to bring them – or not bring them – to the emperor’s attention and urge unpalatable correctives. Autocracy was thus checked by bureaucracy. Ideally it was balanced by it; occasionally it was overbalanced by it.
Much depended on the character of the emperor. Wuwei rulers such as the possibly aloof Wudi and his pacific successors Han Zhaodi (r. 87–74 BC, Han Xuandi (r. 74–49 BC) and Han Yuandi (r. 49–33 BC) were well suited to the system. All the latter (the Han emperors ‘Z’, ‘X’ and ‘Y’ for those allergic to assonance) won warm praise in the pages of the Hanshu. Xuandi so epitomised the ideal of the responsive ruler that his reign ‘could be called the renaissance [of the dynasty]’, while Yuandi was ‘broad-minded and had his inferiors express themselves completely’.19 These ‘Z-X-Y’ decades of the mid-first century BC were marked by retrenchment after the extravagant expenditure of Wudi’s long reign. ‘All within the four seas were exhausted,’ says the Hanshu, ‘the population having been reduced by half’ as a result of Wudi’s foreign adventures. But thanks to corvée exemptions, tax reductions and various amnesties and economies, the people now rediscovered ‘rest and repose’ and ‘became opulent’. Harvests were good, and Heaven held its devastating hand to smile on all that lay under it.
But a dictator like the Qin First Emperor (he of the ‘terracotta army’ and tantalising tomb) had obviously not welcomed officials who were given to ‘expressing themselves completely’. His book-burning minister Li Si had habitually tendered advice only after ascertaining that it was likely to prove acceptable or ensuring that it first came from someone else. Emperors of an independent character were a liability. Bureaucrats and palace officials must either conspire to corrupt them with dissolute distractions or simply bide their time. Worse still, though, was no emperor at all, or one too young or incompetent to appreciate his role. Regents and empresses might then fill the vacuum, fighting among themselves, and placing the entire bureaucracy under enormous strain as they vied for its support or strove to short-circuit it.
This was what happened as the first century BC ground towards its end. It can hardly have been a surprise. Succession crises had dogged the Han ever since the death of their ‘Great Progenitor’ (Han Gaozu). The feisty Dowager Empress Lü had then manipulated the succession with a view to replacing the house of Han with her own Lü clan; and this seems to have set a precedent for similar manoeuvres by virtually every subsequent empress and her supporters.
Since an empress was by definition either the would-be mother, or the mother already, of a potential heir apparent, such jockeying should not have threatened the succession. But as in the bureacracy, so in the palace – duplication complicated matters. Rarely could it be assumed that an empress w
as for life; they came and went with dismal frequency. They might fail to produce a male heir, be eliminated by a rival, implicated in a plot, find another’s son preferred to their own, or simply fall from imperial favour. Delectable replacements from the ranks of all those ‘Brilliant Companions’ and ‘Compliant Ladies’ could be insistent and hard for an emperor to resist, especially if they had a promising heir apparent already in tow. Dowager empresses further complicated matters. As well as being experienced in palace intrigue and less vulnerable to imperial fancy, the dowagers retained great influence as residuary legatees of their husbands’ heavenly authority and as the mothers or grandmothers (in which case they were grand dowager empresses) of incumbent emperors.
Another succession-related crisis had darkened the last days of Han Wudi’s long reign. In 91 BC his empress, née Wei, had been implicated in a case of witchcraft. The origins of this affair are unfathomable, though its ramifications were horrific. Her son, the heir apparent, took up arms against his father, the ageing Wudi; Chang’an was plunged into civil war; and eventually almost the entire Wei clan was eliminated, including a chancellor, an inordinate number of generals, the heir apparent and the Empress Wei herself. But the proposed substitution of another favoured consort, plus son, met with much the same outcome; another chancellor was toppled and more generals disgraced, Li Guangli, the conqueror of Ferghana, among them. The Wei purge was then reviewed, mistakes were acknowledged, and the few surviving members of the clan reinstated. They included a toddler, the grandson of the rebellious heir apparent, who would one day reign as Han Xuandi, plus a stern and rather intimidating figure, the nephew of the deceased Empress Wei, called Huo Guang.
As Wudi’s health declined, Huo Guang emerged as a capable minister and stabilising influence. A new heir apparent, Wudi’s son by yet another consort, was soon in place, although when the emperor died in 87 BC, this Zhaodi was still only seven. Fortunately Wudi had made his wishes clear. Bypassing the ‘Three Excellencies’ (Chancellor, Commander-in-Chief and Grand Minister of Public Works), he had appointed what would in effect be a regency triumvirate headed by Huo Guang. Lest his meaning was still unclear, he had also presented Huo Guang with a specially commissioned painting that depicted the grand old Duke of Zhou, every Confucian’s hero, offering kindly guidance to the young King Cheng back in the early days of the Western (or Former) Zhou around 1043 BC.
To this challenge of emulating a revered figure from nearly a millennium earlier Huo Guang rose with almost indecent confidence. He exercised complete authority, buttressed it by supplying young Zhaodi with one of his granddaughters by way of an empress, and then when Zhaodi, still heirless and barely twenty, mysteriously died, shrugged off the inevitable suspicions and set about finding another compliant emperor. In this tortuous endeavour he was much assisted by the authority that reposed in the now dowager empress, who was otherwise his fifteen-year-old granddaughter.
As a first move, Wudi’s only remaining son was cold-shouldered, probably because, being more than twice the age of Zhaodi, he would have had little need for a regent. Instead, one of Wudi’s grandsons was summoned to Chang’an. According to the Hanshu, this young man responded to the call too promptly and then embraced his heavenly perks much too enthusiastically. The palaces rang with song and ribaldry when they should have been in mourning; Zhaodi’s womenfolk were liberally favoured while their former lord yet lay in state; and more credibly, the new emperor showed vindictive tendencies towards any who criticised his conduct. Sensing imminent danger as much as insupportable disrepect, Huo Guang moved quickly. Within a month the young man had been deposed by an edict issued on the authority of the little dowager empress. Another directive summoned Bingyi, the same great-grandson of Wudi and his Empress Wei who as a toddler had escaped the witchcraft purge of seventeen years earlier and was now (74 BC) installed as Han Xuandi.
For Huo Guang it was a case of ‘third emperor lucky’. The grateful Xuandi proved a model ruler and showered him with precious gifts, including the revenue and service obligations from an unprecedented 17,000 households. He also ensured that Huo Guang retained an unassailable position until, after a short illness, in 68 BC the great facilitator finally died of natural causes – itself a privilege seldom enjoyed by the most senior officials, especially those who dabbled in the succession. Huo Guang’s funeral was the grandest ever witnessed for someone of less than imperial rank. Xuandi himself attended; and, says the Hanshu, among the emperor’s parting gifts was the investiture, redolent of royalty, of a sea-grey suit of tailored jade.
CONFUCIAN FUNDAMENTALISM
Though Han Wudi had so warmly recommended the tutelary role played by the long-dead Duke of Zhou, he seems not to have approved of some of the duke’s ideas on imperial authority – ideas such as virtue being essential to legitimacy, moral excellence being the best guarantee of an orderly society, and the Mandate being both contingent and transferable. On the contrary, Wudi, and then Huo Guang, continued to uphold the need for authority to be beyond dispute, for laws to be strictly enforced, punishments vigorously inflicted, and service universally exacted. The severity of Qin and its legalist exponents was invoked without embarrassment, while the Confucian habit of harping on the past and emphasising the ‘magnetic’ attraction of moral rectitude was ridiculed as hopelessly impractical.
But a reaction was soon under way. Han Xuandi, and more especially his son Han Yuandi, presided over a surge in Confucian remorse for the excesses of Wudi’s reign. By the end of the century, appalled by the example of Huo Guang’s exercise in dynastic manipulation and carried along by this swelling tide of reaction, a much-ridiculed figure would be embarking on a unique experiment in what might tentatively be called Confucian fundamentalism.
Evidence for this turning of the ideological tide is to be found both in the Hanshu’s approval of the economies and retrenchments undertaken during the ‘Z-X-Y’ years, and in an almost unique document that recounts an official consultation of the period. As per its unappetising title – ‘Discourses on Salt and Iron’ – this document ostensibly deals with a discussion of the government monopolies in salt, iron and other commodities. True to the traditions of Chinese literature, it is not, however, entirely what it seems. It in fact ranges very much wider, being part of an official inquiry into the plight of the nation. Similarly, though the monopolies in question dated from Han Wudi’s reign, and though the consultation itself was held in 81 BC in Han Zhaodi’s reign, the surviving account of the debate dates from Han Xuandi’s reign. It was thus composed as much as twenty or thirty years after the event.
It could have been based on an original transcript and intended as a belated record of the debate, or perhaps it was simply undertaken as an academic exercise; but much of its interest lies in the mid-first-century BC context in which it was written. Throughout the discusssion, official spokesmen are called on to defend the government’s hard-line policies against the criticisms of articulate opponents. These government spokesmen have since been designated ‘modernists’ and their critics ‘reformists’, although neither can be regarded as advocating an exactly progressive agenda; it was more a case of conservative pragmatism versus reactionary idealism.20
The modernists rehearsed legalist arguments: people are naturally lazy and need to be coerced; laws are worthless if not enforced; monopolies are beneficial to both state and consumer; taxes and labour service are essential for security and social betterment; expansion and trade likewise; and government is about everyday realities, not abstract theories. The reformists, on the other hand, followed Confucian thinking to disagree on all counts: the people should be left to get on with their work, which was agriculture, not state service or manufacturing or moneymaking; foreign adventures, whether military or commercial, were unproductive; state-run industries were inefficient and produced shoddy goods; and the government should step back on all fronts, cut down on extravagance, cultivate a social conscience, and restore the balance between yin and yang by promoting rectitude and
emulating the more benign policies of ancient times. Somewhat perversely, then, ‘the modernists’ were defending the status quo and ‘the reformists’ advocating a return to the distant past.
Very little came of the discussion. The state-run monopoly of salt was retained, that of iron withdrawn only in respect of manufactories in Chang’an itself, and that of liquor only in respect of the provinces (where it had probably been ineffective anyway). Yet throughout the debate it was the hard-line modernists who were repeatedly reduced to silence, while the Confucian reformists enjoyed triumph after triumph; they required fewer speakers than their opponents, their arguments received greater coverage, and they usually got the best lines: officials without a good grounding in the classics were described as like landlubbers ‘putting to sea without oars’, and dispatching expeditions against the Xiongnu was as unproductive as ‘fishing in the Yangzi without a net’. The Qin emperors and their legalist advisers were repeatedly rubbished for having fallen beneath the weight of their own oppression; yet the Zhou and their peerless duke emerged unscathed. Thus the whole exercise was portrayed as a victory for the Confucian ‘reformists’, though in 81 BC it had probably been nothing of the sort. But by 40 BC, when this record of the debate was recorded, their arguments were being vindicated and Confucian reformism was indeed about to triumph.
This important trend owed little to the personal influence of the emperors, who followed one another in quick succession during the last half of the century. Han Yuandi (r. 49–33 BC) liked serious music, displayed moderation in all things, and was often ill. The economies associated with his reign were largely the work of his reformist officials. So was the very cold reception accorded to Chen Tang, a military officer in Xinjiang whose prompt action had resulted in a crushing defeat of the Xiongnu in 36 BC. Chen Tang’s escapade had taken him west as far as Sogdiana (Samarkand) and had certainly upstaged Li Guangli’s ponderous successes in the same region seventy years earlier. But because of the urgency of the situation, Chen Tang had had to act unofficially and on forged authority. Given the favourable outcome, this might have been overlooked had opinion still favoured a forward policy. But it did not; central Asia was no longer considered a priority, foreign adventures found no precedent in the now fashionable history of the Zhou kings, and Chen Tang was lucky not to be executed.