by John Keay
Han Hedi’s accession in AD 88 introduced another complication, namely a minority, for he was barely nine years old. In accordance with a tradition that extended back through the Dowager Empress Wang (wife of Han Chengdi and aunt of Wang Mang) to the Dowager Empress Lü (wife and virtual successor of the ‘Great Progenitor’ Han Gaozu), this opened the way for the exercise of power by the now Dowager Empress Dou, the widow of Hedi’s deceased father. It also meant appointing a regent who, like the revered Duke of Zhou, might shoulder the burden of rule while, like Wang Mang and Huo Guang, shamelessly manipulating the succession. Naturally the Dowager Empress chose as regent one of her brothers, Dou Xian; and thus by AD 90 it was the Dou clan who appeared to be in a position of unassailable power.
It lasted only a couple of years. In early AD 91 Han Hedi was deemed to have come of age and duly assumed the imperial cap and insignia. Eighteen months later, with the advice and active encouragement of the senior palace eunuch, Hedi effectively staged a coup against the Dou clan and their suffocating attentions. Dou Xian and his brothers saw fit to kill themselves; numerous supporters, including Ban Gu, the main author of the Hanshu, were executed; and the dowager empress, though spared, was removed from public life.
Hedi, however, had his own succession problems. One empress, then another, failed to bear him a son. When he died in 106, it was the second of these, the empress (now dowager) Deng and her inevitable faction, who selected as his successor Han Shangdi (r. 106). At the time Shangdi was just three months old and not destined to get much older. He died before his first birthday and was replaced by Han Andi (r. 106–125). Andi, at twelve, could be considered a veteran. His coming of age was imminent, and with it the chance of an emperor actually ruling and deciding the succession for himself. Unfortunately Andi managed neither of these goals. He was weak and incompetent, and his only claim on posterity’s attention is as, by general consent, ‘the worst sovereign of the two Han dynasties’.19 It was during his reign that the Western Regions were abandoned, the Qiang resumed their offensive and the more immediate empire was again beset by natural disasters.
By now a pattern was emerging. Emperors, instead of managing their support, were more often being managed by it. Of the contesting elements in the dynastic free-for-all that would characterise the last days of the Later Han, all bar one – the military – were in place. Of these elements the bureaucracy as it had existed under the Former Han continued to operate but was not the most important contender. Rather did it provide a source of patronage. Its senior posts were treated as sinecures, given as rewards, and by the late second century AD openly sold to the highest bidder. The bureaucracy’s executive functions were increasingly usurped by a separate palace secretariat which, as the ‘Department of Affairs of State’, would exercise supreme executive authority and acquire its own bureaux, or ‘boards’. Under the Later Han it was staffed by men whose main qualification for office was not a knowledge of the classics but proximity to the emperor or his acting surrogates.
Meanwhile the bureaucracy’s wider administrative responsibilities were being circumscribed by intervention from above and fragmentation from below. More and more land, along with its produce and population – in effect the empire’s tax base – was being partially alienated in the form of heritable kingdoms (for imperial cadets) and more especially marquisates (principally for the relatives and supporters of contending empresses). Individually the old commanderies and counties were thus shrinking, while collectively they were being subordinated to a superior structure of provinces or regions (zhou). Originally these provinces comprised the circuits covered by the inspectors (‘shepherds’ or censors) who oversaw the bureaucratic machinery. But in time, inspectorates became permanent, were based in their own ‘provincial’ capitals and acquired their own bureaucratic and, as of AD 180, even military establishments. Thus the dozen or so provinces, though divided into commanderies and counties, pocked by kingdoms and marquisates and perforated by peripheral feudatory dependencies, now constituted the primary divisions of the empire. Once under military command, they would constitute the power bases from which contenders would finally challenge and overthrow the Han.
More active than the bureaucracy in the pursuit of reward and influence was that parallel world of carefully supervised rank-holders inside the imperial harem. An emperor enjoyed the services of hundreds, often thousands, of young women. Like the bureaucrats, they were recommended to court either by their families or local officials and then selected by examination. Though the examination involved no written submission, it was of a thorough and intimate character, special attention being paid to the flawless nature of the girl’s complexion, figure, physique and virginity, as well as to her deportment, accomplishments and the repute of her family. ‘Skin white and fine . . . belly round, hips square, body like congealed lard and carved jade, breasts bulging and navel deep enough to take a half-inch pearl,’ reported one examiner, ‘no piles, no blemishes, no moles and no sores, nor defects in the mouth, the nose, the armpits, the private parts, or the feet.’20 A family’s fortunes might be riding on the outcome. If the candidate was selected and duly ‘favoured’ by the emperor, rank, office and honours would flow to her relatives. If she bore him a son, these rewards would be upgraded and her status within the imperial household dramatically enhanced. To be a candidate for empress, powerful support counted for more than a love-struck emperor. But the rewards could be worth it; sons being scarce among the Later Han, a chance to influence the succession beckoned.
The Standard Histories nevertheless tell of emperors so distracted and besotted by their womenfolk that they habitually neglected the call of duty and ignored the plight of the empire. Consorts and dowagers are portrayed as inherently devious and spiteful, devoid of any sense of duty, and largely responsible for the endless intrigues and purges. This was explained in cosmic terms as yin, the passive female principle, being in disastrous ascendancy over yang, its active male opposite or complement. All of which not only reeks of gender prejudice – we know of only one female Han historian – but is open to serious doubt on other grounds.
Ban Zhao, that one lady historian, was she who completed the Hanshu after the execution of her brother Ban Gu. She also wrote another work entitled Lessons for Women. The lessons were scarcely empowering. A woman’s role was one of willing and vigilant subservience to family, husband and in-laws; her attention should be directed to personal hygiene and chaste conduct; appropriate activities included sewing, weaving and light kitchen duties. But the author did register a plea for equality of education, and from about AD 100 Ban Zhao herself acted as tutor and adviser to Han Hedi’s second consort, the empress and then Dowager Empress Deng. How far Ban Zhao influenced her pupil is not known, but it seems unlikely that empresses, who were often little more than children when they took an emperor’s fancy, can themselves have been mistresses of the Machiavellian arts. More plausibly, when young they served as decorous tools in the hands of their families and when older as dynastic scapegoats at the disposal of Confucian scholarship.
Better understanding of the role played by women under the Later Han, and of the importance of the bridal chamber as a portal to social and political advancement, owes much to the gender-conscious scholarship of recent times. In similar fashion, the total disregard of the toiling peasantry as other than a productive but unpredictable phenomenon, like the weather, has been rectified by historians raised in the traditions of proletarian revolution. But the same affirmative treatment has yet to be extended to another influential and characteristic component of court life, the eunuchs.
In phrases like ‘the evils of eunuchry’, the stereotype of a manipulative and corrupt fraternity of falsetto felons still haunts the textbooks, uncorrected by any latter-day lobby of emasculated revisionists.21 It originated in the Hanshu and subsequent Standard Histories, where castration is taken to be contemptible, with words like ‘capon’ and ‘gelding’ getting an airing. Worse than the physical mutilation, though, wa
s the renunciation of Confucian values implied by a condition that eliminated the possibility of descendants. For the chance of an easy life overseeing his masters’ breeding stock of consorts and concubines, a eunuch was thought to have ducked his own reproductive responsibilities and severed the continuum of his lineage. It was tantamount to apostasy. There would be neither heirs to perform his funerary rites nor descendants to honour him and provide for his ancestors. One who so brazenly flouted all that society held dear must expect to be treated as a pariah.
At a time of intense factionalism, when control of the realm was being contested within that part of the Luoyang palace complex reserved for the emperor’s women, the access and influence enjoyed by eunuchs would be crucial. Since eunuchs are little mentioned prior to the Later Han, it is often assumed that their prominence was in fact a product of the period. But this may appear the case simply because most prior history was derived from the Shiji, whose completion had of course cost its author his own mas-culinity. As a eunuch himself, the Grand Historian had been disinclined to advertise the menial role of others so afflicted, or to heap disparagement and blame upon them. He was, too, painfully aware that castration could be a punishment rather than a career move, and that as a father himself prior to mutilation, it did not in fact preclude the possibility of descendants. Even eunuchs-from-childhood could acquire children through adoption. The practice was common, and under the Later Han, eunuch ‘fathers’ won the right to pass on their ranks and offices to these adopted heirs.
When in AD 125 Han Andi died having neither asserted the authority of the throne nor made any clear provision for the succession, his childless empress took the now familiar step of raiding the palace crèche. But her selection of an infant so insignificant that not even his identity is recorded misfired. For this ‘Han Anon-di’ (for want of a better name) died within the year; and before another babe could be snatched from his wet-nurse, a palace coup brought the installation of Andi’s only son (albeit by a concubine), the eleven-year-old Han Shundi (r. 125–144). The coup, accompanied by the usual executions and suicides, was important in that it was the first to be engineered by eunuchs. Moreover the eunuchs had shown a clear preference for a candidate with a reasonable chance of attaining adulthood and so of dispensing with the heavy-handed supervision of Dowager Empress Deng and her faction. Shundi would be grateful; and thereafter the palace eunuchs would often shore up imperial authority against the encroaching tide of kingmakers, whether dowagers, regents, bureaucrats or generals.
Such loyalty to the dynasty might have won the eunuchs more favourable treatment from posterity had they not, like everyone else, then rewarded themselves by extracting grants and honours from the emperor and by engaging in the factional merry-go-round. Shundi’s installation brought marquisates for eighteen eunuchs, plus a return to power for the Liang faction, one of whose ladies became empress. Through a succession of regents and imperial brides, the Liangs hung on to power until AD 159. Meanwhile emperors came and went, most of them being toddlers with a suspiciously short life expectancy. In fact not one of the last nine emperors of the Later Han was an adult at the time of his accession.
A major earthquake in AD 133 and a drought in AD 134 heralded disturbances in the far south, Xianbei raids in the north and revolts in Gansu. All were seen as bad omens and triggered the post-AD 145 rash of rebel emperors, plus the usual scholarly doubts about the Mandate and the dynasty’s future. These were not allayed when an emperor, Han Huandi (r. 146–168), actually managed to reach manhood. For like Han Hedi, Huandi resented his matronly minder and soon moved against her whole Liang faction. Largely with eunuch support, the Liangs were ousted amid the usual bloodletting. Huandi then chose as bride – or more accurately was chosen as groom for – a Deng damsel, quickly followed by a Dou damsel. But the jinx continued. When Huandi died, not one of his empresses had borne him a son; nor had he nominated a successor. The succession was up for grabs again, and in time-honoured fashion the twenty-year-old Empress Dou set another child on the throne, confirmed her father as regent, and so reinstated the great Dou clan of the north-west.
Regent Dou then plotted the overthrow of the eunuchs, who were by now sufficiently entrenched to menace any faction’s monopoly of power and patronage. The plot, a none-too-subtle scheme involving the execution of every eunuch at court, leaked out. Forewarned, the eunuchs closed ranks, commandeered the young emperor and the dowager empress, and on their authority deployed troops to secure Luoyang’s twin palaces and the walkway between them. Regent Dou and his supporters also called on the military. The opposing forces confronted one another, traded insults and bellowed threats. There was no actual fighting on this occasion; Regent Dou’s men deserted him, and he and his supporters, plus their extended families – perhaps a few hundred in all – were subsequently either killed or committed suicide. With the deployment of troops within the capital, a dangerous new precedent had been set.
The new emperor was Han Lingdi (r. 168–189), a rival to Han Andi for the title of the dynasty’s worst. Though he achieved his majority in 171, he remained a hopeless dependant on eunuch support throughout his reign. With the fall of the Dou, the eunuchs instituted proceedings against Dou partisans within the bureaucracy. This brought a bloody purge of the offending clique and something called the ‘Great Proscription’. When required to authorise it, the thirteen-year-old emperor dared to ask what was meant by a ‘proscription’ and what exactly was a ‘clique’. It was explained that the one excluded from office the other, clique members being all those related in any degree to the purged officials. Later extended, this bar on family-based factions effectively reserved to the eunuchs and their henchmen a lucrative monopoly of all senior posts within the palace secretariat and the old bureaucracy.
Resentment of the Great Proscription and of the eunuchs’ flagrant abuse of power mounted throughout the AD 170s. In the provinces the tide of local revolt and vocal disaffection refused to ebb; the south was again in turmoil; and the entire northern border was at the mercy of a Xianbei confederacy led by Tanshihuai, a nomadic leader in the great tradition of Maodun and the later Chinggis Khan. Yet all these were as nothing compared to the mass uprising that occurred in AD 184. ‘In a few weeks the whole empire joined in rebellion and the capital was in fear and trembling,’ says a digest of the Standard History.22
Not unlike the Red Eyebrows in the reign of Wang Mang, this so-called ‘Yellow Turbans’ movement sprang from deep-seated grievances over agrarian distress and administrative corruption. But its focus and energy came from its leader’s command of magical powers and miraculous cures. They made credible his promise of a new age of peace-and-plenty and filled his followers with a quasi-religious zeal. More ominously – and omens, all ill, were indeed being reported even more frequently than uprisings – the Yellow Turbans pretended no loyalty to the Han; on the contrary, the overthrow of the dynasty and its adherents was their declared objective.
In happier times, such a challenge might have led to a closing of ranks in Luoyang. Instead it found court and government totally unprepared. The movement quickly infiltrated the city, where a thousand Yellow Turbans were hunted down, while outside it the massing of the rebels served only to heighten the tension at court and militarise the whole empire. Since the commandery militias were no match for such a mass assault, regular troops were for the first time entrusted to the provincial inspectorates. Simultaneously expeditionary forces were dispatched from Luoyang, so providing some basis for another innovation of the period, a eunuch army, or rather a palace guard under eunuch control. As in the dying days of Wang Mang, the tussle for command saw hastily appointed generals assume elaborate titles before taking the field. From Gansu to Shandong, armies proliferated, their loyalties often doubtful. The Turbans, though occasionally defeated, proved hard to eradicate; the generals, though claiming victory, proved reluctant to disband.
In AD 189, with the rising far from over, Han Lingdi sickened and died. The inevitable succession crisis c
ould hardly have come at a worse time. Dong Zhuo, a tough-talking Gansu warlord who had been conducting operations in the east, had refused to stand down. Rather did he advance with his army to within a day or two’s march of the capital, there to await developments. Happily Lingdi had left two sons, aged thirteen and eight, by different empresses. But though this in itself was no mean achievement, he had declined the responsibility of naming either as his successor. The choice therefore lay with the eunuchs, who, despite lifting the Great Proscription in the face of the Turbans’ revolt, still controlled the main offices of state.
The eunuchs opted for the elder and decidedly dimmer of the two boys. He was duly enthroned as Han Shaodi (r. AD 189); his mother, a butcher’s daughter, became the dowager empress and her brother the effective regent. The arrangement mirrored that of AD 168, recalled the pogrom that had then brought the eunuchs to power, and induced a complementary reaction. The regent, egged on by one of the ever-contending factions, plotted to eradicate the eunuchs. Again the eunuchs got wind of the plot. But by then the plotters had already summoned military support, including Dong Zhuo and his lurking army. Though the eunuchs succeeded in tricking and decapitating the regent, it was their only success. Trapped and then assailed within the Luoyang palace complex, they withdrew from the southern palace up the covered way to the northern palace. With them went the young Han Shaodi and his half-brother. Dong Zhuo remained just outside the city, coveted by all and contemptuous of all. There were enough troops within the city to complete the task. Fire broke out in the southern palace, and in the smoke and the carnage, the eunuchs, some two thousand of them, were massacred to a man. Meanwhile the imperial half-brothers had been mysteriously spirited away.