by John Keay
Few of these policies were entirely novel. Nor, as will be seen, were Wang Mang’s external dealings with the Xiongnu and the Qiang anything like as naive as the Hanshu implies. Even the cumulative effect of so much change might not have been disastrous had Wang Mang been granted the time to implement his ideas and, where necessary, moderate them. In AD 11 he was in his late fifties, and despite the necessarily repulsive portrait offered in the Hanshu (bulging eyes, hoarse voice, pigeon chest, etc.), he was apparently in excellent health. But in that year his nemesis was decreed; all prospects of successful reform were dashed by one of the greatest cataclysms to which China has ever been subject.
First there was a plague of locusts along the Yellow River. It was nothing unusual. A bounty was offered to locust hunters, so many cash (the basic copper coin) per pound being paid out for squashed insects just as, in the no less lowering times of Chairman Mao’s ‘Great Leap Forward’, a few fen per dead sparrow would be offered to conserve grain stocks and stave off famine. Seemingly there is nothing quite like impending catastrophe to bring out the esteem in which autocrats hold the death-defying capabilities of the masses.
Then came the flood. The Hanshu, in its determination to implicate Wang Mang, is somewhat sparing of the details:
. . . the Yellow River broke its banks in Wei commandery, overflowing several commanderies from Jinghe eastwards. Previously Wang Mang had been fearful that it would break its banks and injure the graves of his ancestors. But the flood went eastwards and they were not troubled. Therefore he did not dike it.8
To be fair, few were the years in which the Yellow River or its tributaries failed to flood. Heavy rains turned the river’s upper waters into a raging soup of Tibetan shales and Mongolian loess that, distributed by sluice and duct throughout the river’s lower basin, accounted for the high fertility of the Zhongyuan (‘central plain’). But as the river’s flow there slowed, so did the silt sink to the bottom and the bottom thus rise to the top. Water levels regularly rose above those of the surrounding countryside and had obliged many previous emperors to divert labour to levee-building and diking. Wang Mang himself had already grappled with the dislocation caused by one such flood during Pingdi’s reign, when the river had spilled from its normal course south of the Shandong peninsula and wandered farther south to join the Huai River. But the great flood of AD 11–12 took it in the opposite direction. A wall of water cut a wide swathe across the densely populated plain and diverted the entire river from its southern outlets to a new delta several hundred kilometres away to the north of the Shandong peninsula.
The Hanshu says little of the lives that were lost, the livelihoods destroyed, the anarchy that directly resulted, or the loss of revenue and manpower suffered by the government. But by collating these floods with the extant population data, Hans Bielenstein, an authority on the period as well as a Wang Mang apologist, has deduced massive disruption throughout the empire’s heartland, followed by widespread civil disorder and a major population drift westward and southward away from the devastated areas into the valleys of the Huai, Han and Yangzi rivers. ‘Unrest sprang up along the migration routes, where starving peasants banded together to take food by force,’ says Bielenstein. ‘. . . [In Shandong] the peasant bands grew and eventually merged into a large, poorly organised, but nearly invincible army.’9 The Hanshu calls these desperate militias ‘the Red Eyebrows’ (after the minimal insignia they daubed on their foreheads) and ascribes their rebellion to Wang Mang’s misrule. Imperial forces sent east to quell the trouble failed to do so. By AD 22 the rebels were still advancing on all fronts with some sections streaming west towards Chang’an.
They were not the only ones taking advantage of the post-flood chaos and the empire’s plight. In the far north the Xiongnu and Wuhuan were threatening the frontiers, while in southern Henan and Hubei (once the heartland of Chu and the locus of anti-Qin revolt) more peasant unrest was being eagerly championed by disaffected members of the rural gentry, some of them junior members of the Han lineage. While the Red Eyebrows remained true to their populist roots, these Han-led peasant armies claimed a troubling legitimacy by espousing the restoration of the previous dynasty and finding plentiful portents for Heaven’s rejection of the present one. In AD 23 they took Luoyang and set up there a Han scion as the ‘Gengshi (‘New-beginning’) emperor’.
Wang Mang, too, was dismayed by Heaven’s inexplicable censures. As he lurched between defiance and clemency, enemies closed in on Chang’an and supporters either deserted or were purged. Intensifying his textual studies, the emperor dug out promising precedents and came up with yet more names. If the Hanshu may be believed, he also appealed for experts in unconventional warfare to come to the aid of the empire. A suggestion for a pontoon bridge composed of swimming horses was explored, as were appetite-suppressing pills as a lightweight alternative to military rations. The reconnaisance service offered by a man who claimed that he could fly sounded particularly promising. The aviator constructed his wings from the pinions of a large bird, ‘connected them by pivots’, and having covered his body with more plumage ‘flew several hundred double-paces’, says the Hanshu, ‘then fell’. Editor Dubs, in a deadpan footnote, suggests that an eminence may have served as a launch pad and that ‘this is perhaps the earliest authentic account of human flight’.10
An alternative reading of the frantic experimentation that characterised the last days of the Xin might suggest that Wang Mang was at his wits’ end. He took to a diet of ale and shellfish, ‘read only military books’, and slept at his writing stool. By the time Chang’an fell to the first peasant army, he was too weak to walk. With fire raging through the Weiyang Palace he was carried to a moated tower outside the city. The Hanshu conjures up a Nero-like scenario with the emperor surveying the devastation from the tower’s topmost parapets; King Lear might be nearer the mark. A litany of new titles, such as ‘The General-Causing-Great-Waters-to-Run-So-Extinguishing-Any-Fire-that-has-Arisen’, proved ineffective. So did a written appeal ‘in more than a thousand words’ that Wang Mang addressed personally to Heaven and accompanied with heart-rending lamentations.
Surrounded by the attacking mob, a thousand faithful supporters offered stout resistance until their arrows ran out. The mob then forded the moat and, just as the light was fading in the western sky, scaled the tower. Wang Mang fell in the crepuscular slaughter, his corpse being decapitated and dismembered on the spot. Dozens died in the fight to secure gory souvenirs, reports the Hanshu, and in so doing, repeats exactly the characters used by Sima Qian, the Grand Historian, to describe the fate of Xiang Yu on the banks of the Yangzi two centuries earlier. The penalty for opposing the Han was the same; so was the phrasing appropriate to such a crime.11
ACROSS THE WATERSHED
Recent scholarship, though united in suspicion of the Hanshu’s caricature of Wang Mang, is far from unanimous about the effect of his policies. As an experiment in the reordering of an empire, they had undoubtedly failed. Confucian remedies, culled from an often defective tradition or lifted from the more contentious Zhouli, and then literally interpreted and slavishly applied, had proved no panacea; a hallowed past could not be resuscitated simply by replicating its institutions and its nomenclature. Although the idea of a utopian taiping based on the Confucian texts would appeal to later usurpers (and most notably to those nineteenth-century insurgents who actually adopted ‘Taiping’ as their title), it ceased to engage the orthodox. For them, using Confucianism as a crude political blueprint was a mistake. The zealotry so evident among Confucian ‘reformists’ in the first century BC would become notably more restrained in the first centuries ad. Gentlemen-scholars would often shun politics altogether to savour the simple life of the countryside or retreat into the metaphysical undergrowth of those nonconformist practices and beliefs associated with Daoism.
Confucianism as a moral code, however, was a different matter. Arguably, Wang Mang’s apparent obsession with style over substance – with mimicking outward forms inste
ad of cultivating inward virtues – entrenched what one scholar has aptly termed ‘the Confucian persuasion’. The Chinese language has no personalised noun corresponding to the English word ‘Confucianism’. Ru, the character which is so translated, means something much more general like ‘learned gentility’ or simply ‘dilettante-(ism)’. Lacking the specifics of either a political philosophy, a personal ideology or an organised religion (except insofar as Confucius himself became a cult figure), ‘Confucianism’ is best seen as the text-hallowed brand of learning elaborated by Master Kong and his followers to advance a unique ‘moral perspective’.
This moral perspective, or ‘persuasion’, embraces all social, cultural and political relationships. It disposes them in an ordered hierarchy and ordains the behaviour appropriate to each. Son and father, student and teacher, subject and ruler – all are locked into morally binding one-to-one relationships which, though notionally reciprocal, in practice hinge on the deference and devotion required of the junior partner – the son, student, subject. So too with wife and husband, family and ancestors, feudatory and sovereign, and so on. For those of ‘the Confucian persuasion’, ethical precept governs all, and no aspect of domestic life, professional affairs or government policy can be discussed without reference to it.
This was especially true in the serried ranks of the bureaucracy, a service composed entirely of ru (in the sense of ‘Confucian scholars’) recruited for their proficiency in ru (in the sense of ‘the Confucian classics’). Nor would the troubled times ahead change this. Though intellectually challenged by Buddhism and Daoism, and somewhat marginalised by the patronage these ‘religions’ attracted as well as by the rise of militarism, the Confucian persuasion would yet stand its ground wherever peace pertained and civil government flourished. ‘Disdained by ruthless monarchs,’ writes the late Arthur Wright, ‘thwarted by palace intrigue, circumvented by eunuch power, undone by venality in their own ranks, China’s bureaucrats nevertheless persisted in their efforts to infuse the politics of the realm with the principles of Confucian morality.’12
Here, then, may be detected another of those great civilisational continuities. Though less obvious than an elegant literacy, or the primacy awarded to history, to the membership of an agrarian society surrounded by more nomadic peoples, and to imperial integration as the political norm, ‘the Confucian persuasion’ yet underpinned all these conceits and would prove no less enduring.
Wang Mang’s ‘fundamentalism’ did not discredit the principles of Confucianism, and neither can his reactionary reforms be held primarily responsible for the chaos that engulfed the empire during and after his reign. Rather was it the social and economic upheaval, the mass migrations and the breakdown in law and order that resulted from the flooding of the Yellow River. Destitution being the most compelling of dictators, probably no emperor could have controlled the situation. A form of government devised for a settled agrarian population was in deep trouble the moment villagers turned vagrants and farmers took to brigandage. With the fields obliterated and the registered householders no longer at home, the revenue failed and the corvée collapsed. Central authority was itself undermined. It was this dislocation which encouraged a host of contenders for the Mandate in the AD 20s, sustained numerous other rebellions of a more peripheral nature, and encouraged landed clans in the core provinces to exploit the situation by augmenting the size of both their holdings and their followings. The Han would have to come to terms with all these groups. Restoration would entail as much in the way of compromise as conquest, and this in turn would leave the dynasty a prey to the factional struggles that would eventually engulf it.
A watershed in more ways than one, Wang Mang’s chaotic reign had divided the Han era in two. Just like the Zhou kings of old, the restored Han of the first century AD would seek to put recent reverses behind them by choosing a new setting for their imperial capital. They too forsook the marginal but easily defended Wei valley in Shaanxi (once the homeland of Qin as well as Zhou and where stood Chang’an) in favour of the more easterly city of Luoyang, close to the Yellow River and at the heart of the central plain in northern Henan. Such a move had been meditated by Han Gaozu, often mooted since, and recently anticipated by the Han claimant known as the Gengshi (‘New Beginning’) emperor. At the head of an army from southern Henan, in early AD 23 this Gengshi emperor had successfully challenged Wang Mang’s forces only to find his ‘new beginning’ brought to an early end. Overwhelmed by a starving horde of Red Eyebrows as they streamed west to Chang’an, in AD 24 the Gengshi emperor was deposed, then murdered. For a second time, and then a third, Chang’an was burned and its palaces and ancestral tombs ransacked. In preferring Luoyang to this charred devastation, the next Han claimant would bow as much to necessity as strategy. No less pragmatic, history also views the Han’s eastward move as a watershed. Mimicking the chronological division of the Zhou, it knows the Han emperors of Chang’an who preceded Wang Mang as the ‘Former’ or ‘Western’ Han, and their distant cousins in Luoyang who succeeded Wang Mang as the ‘Later’ or ‘Eastern’ Han.
But in AD 24 the succession was far from assured. Would-be emperors were lining up all over the place. In what he calls ‘a crowded field’, Bielenstein notes eleven contenders who actually declared themselves imperial runners. At least one rode with the vagabond Red Eyebrows and another with the dreaded Xiongnu. Some were regional warlords, two of the most powerful being Gansu-based rebels who had risen against Wang Mang, while the most enduring was a Wang Mang loyalist in Sichuan. Nearly all claimed Han descent, usually as sixth-generation descendants of Han Jingdi (r. 157–141 BC), the grandson of the ‘Great Progenitor’. But of these Han claimants, the most forward, the Gengshi emperor, had made an early exit and the most able had been eliminated in a feud. There remained the latter’s younger brother, an unrated contender called Liu Xiu. He nevertheless assumed imperial rank in AD 25 and thereafter displayed unsuspected qualities to outwit all rivals and, as Han Guang Wudi, become the recognised founder of the Later Han dynasty.
None of this was achieved overnight. In general, the Later Han would prove less adventurous than the Former Han and far more prone to crises. The official histories award them a generous two centuries (AD 25–220); but their first eight decades were characterised by laborious reconstruction, the next eight brought a painful unravelling, and the last four saw them reduced to a pitiful irrelevance. When later writers sang of the glories of Han, they almost invariably had in mind the Former or Western Han, not the Later or Eastern Han.
Han Guang Wudi’s thirty-two-year reign (AD 25–57) was devoted entirely to re-establishing the dynasty. The reconstruction of Luoyang and its elevation into a capital worthy of All-under-Heaven’s ruler was as crucial to this process as the suppression of revolt. More regular in its grid-like configuration than Chang’an, Luoyang’s walled and gated inner city would comprise an area of 10 square kilometres (4 square miles). In accordance with hallowed principle, the domestic establishment of the always ‘south-facing’ emperor was located in its northern palace with government offices in its southern palace. The two were linked by a 3-kilometre (2-mile) screened walkway that bisected the inner city. Extensive suburbs sprawled outside the great walls; though of tamped earth, or hangtu, ‘the walls still measure up to ten metres in height today’. Bielenstein makes the city inferior only to contemporary Chang’an and Rome in terms of size, and claims that its population of ‘no less than half a million’ exceeded either.13
In defeating his many rivals, Han Guang Wudi displayed an aptitude for military command that was rare among emperors, plus a confidence in his subordinate generals that was almost unprecedented. Internal revolt was dealt with first. The Red Eyebrows, much reduced by a hard winter in Shaanxi and a sound drubbing from one of the Gansu warlords, were forced to surrender in AD 26. Other revolts in the central plain and Shandong were largely quelled by AD 30 and Gansu brought to heel by AD 34. Two years later Sichuan (or ‘Shu’, for its self-declared emperor had r
esurrected the name of the kingdom extinguished by Qin three centuries earlier) finally surrendered. Fire-belching dreadnoughts, rather than stone cattle, this time proved its undoing. In a notable campaign a Han naval force sailed up the Yangzi, ignited Shu’s floating battlements, which spanned the river just below the gorges, and then blazed a trail to Chengdu, the Shu capital.
The outlying regions of the Former Han’s once sprawling empire took longer to reclaim, mainly because they were slower to revolt. It is customary to follow the Hanshu in blaming Wang Mang for their loss. His passion for rectifying names is supposed to have antagonised the shanyu (king) of the Xiongnu; and in the same spirit of insensitive superiority he may have reneged on existing trading arrangements. ‘Seldom can a man have been so consummately deceived by his own propaganda,’ writes a generally sympathetic authority.14 Yet Han Guang Wudi would treat the shanyu no less contemptuously than Wang Mang, and it was only after a later spat in the AD 30s that the Former Han commanderies along the northern frontier were abandoned. The same was true elsewhere. Contact with the Western Regions (that is Xinjiang) was lost not during Wang Mang’s reign but in the course of the civil war that followed it; trouble with the ‘proto-Tibetan’ Qiang peoples of the Kokonor region of Qinghai, whom Wang Mang had subdued, re-ignited only as his authority failed; and the revolt in Vietnam did not break out until sixteen years after his death.
The reconquest of these regions owed much to the great Ma Yuan, head of a powerful landed clan in the Wei valley, who besides tendering advice that stabilised the currency after Wang Mang’s experiments was one of the most successful Later Han generals. In fact General Ma would become a cult figure; in some parts of China there are still temples dedicated to his memory. When offering his services and the allegiance of his family to Han Guang Wudi in AD 28, General Ma was revealingly frank. ‘In present times’, he explained, ‘it is not only the sovereign who selects his subjects. The subjects also select their sovereign.’15 The emperor apparently accepted this, and Ma’s faction duly became one of a handful that exercised enormous influence at court throughout the Later Han period.