by John Keay
It was thought they were loose in the countryside; but to generations of later Chinese they had in fact slipped over the historical horizon into the kinder realms of fiction. For it is at this point, with the last of the Later Han at large in an empire that was no longer theirs, that the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, one of the greatest works of Chinese historical fiction, begins.
‘When Lingdi closed his eyes on 13 May 189, in a sense the whole traditional empire died with him,’ writes a contributor to the Cambridge History of China.23 A new era, ‘the Period of Disunion’, was dawning. Its history would be painful; yet romance would make it palatable, even popular. The Romance of the Three Kingdoms has much the same relationship to factual history as the Arthurian legends or the plays of Shakespeare. Its heroes command greater recognition than all the Later Han emperors put together, and its pacy tone betrays a keen sense of narrative suspense. Thus each of its 120 chapters ends with the same formula; a cliff-hanging interrogative is followed by a standardised injunction: ‘What then had become of the Han princes? READ ON.’
7
FOUR HUNDRED YEARS
OF VICISSITUDE
189–550
THREE KINGDOMS AND THE RED CLIFFS
LOATH TO CAST OFF INTO A mounting tide of dynastic turbulence, traditional histories of China cling to their Han moorings long after logic dictates otherwise. The Yellow Turbans’ revolt of 184, and the military response it elicited from sundry power-brokers and provincial leaders, had shattered the empire throughout its heartland; then in 189 the massacre of the eunuchs had left the person of the Han emperor without the support of the one group that was wholly dependent on imperial authority and generally supportive of it. There would be no going back for either empire or emperor. As of the 180s the issue was one of transition. The continued presence of a Han ‘Son of Heaven’ merely extended a fig-leaf of legitimacy to those bent on replacing him. In an analogy first used during the great civil war between Xiang Yu and Liu Bang (Han Gaozu) and now back in vogue, ‘the deer was loose’. Heaven’s Mandate had broken cover; the chase was on.
First off the mark was Dong Zhuo, the truculent Gansu warlord who at the head of his troops had been observing events from outside Luoyang with ill-disguised relish. Receiving word of the whereabouts of the boy-emperor and his half-brother, he intercepted them. Apparently they had been smuggled out of the palace at dead of night, and ‘proceeding by the light of glow-worms’, had blundered about the countryside till they found and commandeered ‘a commoner’s cart’. The detail of this escapade, as reported by the younger and brighter of the two boys, made a deep impression. Dong Zhuo decided that the boy had more to recommend him as emperor than his speechless half-brother, and by browbeating all opposition and citing the example of Huo Guang’s juggling with Han Wudi’s grandsons in 74 BC, he contrived the switch immediately; Han Shaodi was deposed and his half-brother instated as emperor. Posterity, on the other hand, would become fixated on the idea of Heaven’s Sons jolting along the byways of Shanxi as nocturnal carters. It became a quintessential image of fallen majesty.
As Han Xiandi, the younger boy would reign, if not rule, unchallenged for the next thirty years (189–220). His deposed half-brother was quietly murdered; other Han claimants simply failed to materialise; there was, indeed, little for them to claim. The last of the Later Han thus managed a longer reign than any of his predecessors except the first. Irrelevance, plus imminent extinction, had finally eased the dynasty’s chronic succession problems.
Initially Han Xiandi, the new boy-emperor, remained under Dong Zhuo’s iron control. No favourite of the historians, Dong Zhuo is portrayed as ‘cruel’, ‘vindictive’, ‘relentless in his punishments’, and outrageously dis-respectful. Such conduct neither mollified opponents nor deterred revolt. ‘Bandits and rebels had sprung up everywhere,’ says the Zizhi Tongjian, an exhaustive history which, though written in the eleventh century, incorporates third-century sources that have since been lost. Many of these rebel bands owed their inspiration to the Yellow Turbans; some had 30,000–40,000 armed men; and their leaders rejoiced in blood-curdling nicknames such as ‘Ox-horn Zhang’, ‘Poison Yu’, ‘Zuo of the Eighty-foot Moustache’ and ‘Big Eyes Li’.1
Such groups, though, were small-fry compared to the great landed lineages and factions who, while protesting loyalty to the Han, resented Dong Zhuo’s pretensions and in 190 began to mobilise against him. With strong provincial power bases and the wherewithal to attract able advisers and inspirational commanders, these clans cheerfully harked back to the ‘Spring and Autumn’ and ‘Warring States’ periods. Archaic entities like Shu (Sichuan), Wei (southern Shanxi), Wu (lower Yangzi) and Chu (Huai River and mid-Yangzi) were revived to gratify their territorial ambitions. The strongest among them openly aimed at restoring the office of ba, or ‘hegemon’, with a view to proffering the protection once extended to the powerless Later Zhou to the now equally powerless Later Han.
Threatened by all these forces, Dong Zhuo decided to abandon Luoyang. He would withdraw ‘west of the passes’ to the old capital of Chang’an in the Wei valley, a more defensible position and one nearer to his own power base. He claimed to be following Han Gaozu’s example of 209 BC; new dynasties (Shang, Zhou, Qin and Han) had invariably arisen in the west; perhaps he hoped to emulate them. But if that was the plan, it never reached fruition. Emperor and entourage were sent on ahead to Chang’an; Luoyang was then ransacked and burnt to the ground by Dong Zhuo’s forces, its population, still perhaps half a million, being herded west at sword-point. Thousands fell by the way, and the survivors had barely begun reclaiming Chang’an when they were plunged into more confusion. For in 192 Dong Zhuo was assassinated by his own bodyguard.
The next four years brought no respite from the bloodshed and destruction. Chang’an was repeatedly sacked by avenging armies and ravaged by famine. Detachments of locally settled Qiang and Xiongnu joined in the sport at the invitation of the competing warlords. The imperial court was just part of the spoils. Passed back and forth like an awkward orphan, ‘lodged among thorns and wattles’ and ‘wandering without shelter’, the emperor came of age, accepted an empress and was eventually offloaded back in the ruins of Luoyang. From there he was whisked farther east to Xu. A coastal province adjoining Shandong, Xu was in a region dominated by the wily Cao Cao. As of the year 196 Han Xiandi and his entourage were under the Cao family’s protection, and would remain so.
The young emperor served his new minders well. On Cao Cao he conferred the title duke of Wei in 213 and king of Wei in 216, so endorsing what would be the largest of the ‘Three Kingdoms’ into which the empire was fracturing. Better still, it was in favour of Cao Pi, son and successor of Cao Cao, that Han Xiandi finally abdicated the imperial throne in 220. Easily persuaded and generously compensated, the last of the Han seems to have lived much happier ever after. Meanwhile the Cao family’s Wei dynasty ensconced themselves in a rebuilt Luoyang. After such an amicable handover, they could reasonably claim to be in enjoyment of Heaven’s favour, in possession of the Mandate, and in situ as the sole legitimate successors of illustrious Han.
But the claim did not go unchallenged. The revolt of the Yellow Turbans, and the upheavals that had racked the empire ever since, had proved the ruin of some established families, yet the making of others. As ever, social mobility thrived on political instability. Bold warriors, ingenious strategists, accomplished administrators and persuasive scholars could take their pick of patrons eager for whatever advantage they offered. Handsomely rewarded with revenue assignments and commands, the more able among the newcomers amassed territories, attracted their own followings and then typically either supplanted their erstwhile patrons or split from them. Most were of comparatively obscure origins; charisma, dynamism and evidence of divine favour were what counted. Cao Cao’s father was said to have been the adopted son of a palace eunuch; ‘there was no way of telling his family origins’, says the Zizhi Tongjian, ‘though . . . even in youth he was clever and i
ngenious’.2 Yet by mobilising numerous cousins and by fathering some twenty-five sons, at the time of his death in 219 Cao Cao headed a clan that was a match for any.
Much the same could be said of the founders of the two other kingdoms of the ‘Three Kingdoms’ period. The Sun family had a slightly more distinguished pedigree but again owed its success to ability rather than birth. From the east, Sun Ce had contested Dong Zhuo’s 189 manhandling of the Han succession. Then Sun Quan, his near-invincible brother and successor, reconstituted the region of Wu in the lower Yangzi basin as the second of the Three Kingdoms. Appointed king of Wu by Han Xiandi and later, in a belated response to Xiandi’s abdication, declaring himself to be the legitimate emperor, Sun Quan extended his Wu dynasty’s authority throughout all China-below-the-Yangzi (including northern Vietnam).
Retrospectively Wu came to be seen as the first of the difficult but distinguished succession of Yangzi-based ‘southern dynasties’ that would last, on and off, for a millennium. But at the time, Wu’s claim to legitimacy was the weakest of the Three Kingdoms. It was only when these later southern polities afforded a haven to fugitives from alien rule in the north, and so became redoubts of traditional Han culture, that their aura of authenticity would reflect favourably on Wu as the first imperial dynasty to be based on the Yangzi rather than the Yellow River.
Clever and relentless campaigners as Cao Cao and Sun Quan were, they were yet upstaged as inspirational commanders by Liu Bei, founder of the third of the Three Kingdoms. The histories describe Liu Bei as exceptionally tall with arms that reached to his knees and eyes that could see round to his ears; more prosaically ‘he was a man of great ambitions but few words’.3 The central character in the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, he strides from the page a ready-made hero flanked by two devoted brothers-in-arms (Zhang Fei and Guan Yu, the latter another Herculean figure who would later be deified as Guandi). None was handier with the sword, nobler of intention or better loved than Liu Bei. But his path to glory was long and chequered. Poor and fatherless, he had sold sandals as a child and then enlisted with a military commander in the far north-east. As a mercenary leader drifting through the crumbling empire in the 190s, there can have been little to distinguish him from the likes of Poison Yu and Big Eyes Li.
He was mostly victorious, and his following grew with his reputation. In 197 he joined Cao Cao but soon turned against him and in 201 repaired to Sichuan. Cao Cao then swept all before him in the north and seemed intent on making Sichuan his next target. But fatefully in 208 Cao Cao opted for a southern offensive against Wu; to oppose him, Liu Bei and Sun Quan of Wu joined forces; and at the Red Cliffs, a point on the Yangzi near its confluence with the Han River (and now within the great conurbation of Wuhan), the forces of the north and south finally collided in one of the most decisive battles of the millennium. ‘The key to the history of the period,’ according to one historian, ‘the battle [at the Red Cliffs] decided the question of [China’s] unity or division.’4
Thanks to the Standard Histories, and more especially to derivative works like the Romance of the Three Kingdoms and the countless poems, dramas, operas and comic strips based on it, the battle at the Red Cliffs is better known than any other in pre-modern Chinese history. Vast troop numbers are mentioned, and their deployment in a pre-battle game of bluff and counter-bluff has been carefully studied. But waged along the Yangzi, it was essentially a naval encounter, and like most Chinese battles, hinged on a single manoeuvre.
To cross the river, here about a kilometre wide, Cao Cao had chained together a bridge of boats and, preparatory to floating it across the stream, had moored it alongside his camp-cum-landing-station below the Red Cliffs on the north shore. On the south shore a smaller Wu force awaited the arrival from downstream of the main Wu fleet under Sun Quan. Liu Bei’s allied force was encamped a short distance upstream. It was early January (209), a month of cold north-westerlies that favoured Cao Cao in the lee of the north bank.
Then one night the wind swung round to the south-east and a small fleet put out from the southern shoreline. With sails filling, it winged through the darkness towards Cao Cao’s base. Lookouts there reported its approach, but no alarm was sounded. Defectors were expected; and anyway these were not many-masted warships but lightly manned yawls (or their junk equivalents). Cao Cao’s northern forces were thus quite unprepared for the pyrotechnics when, within hailing distance, fuses were lit below decks, hulls crammed with oil-soaked tinder ignited, and the oncoming fleet became a wall of fire.
The fire was sped by the might of the wind, and the boats homed in like arrows in flight. Soon smoke and flame screened off the sky. Twenty fiery boats rammed into the naval station. All at once Cao’s ships caught fire and, locked in place by their chains, could not escape.5
Though the flames spread from the ships to Cao Cao’s camp, most of his landward troops did in fact escape. But in doing so, they discovered the purpose behind the earlier deployments; for all retreat was cut off, and in a series of ambushes the northern army, already weakened by exhaustion and disease, was practically annihilated. Cao Cao was captured, then quickly released; his captor happened to owe him a favour. But he never again invaded the south. Indeed, it was Sun Quan who advanced, moving his capital to a city within sight of the Red Cliffs that he named Wuchang. (He later moved downriver, and farther north, to where Nanjing now stands.) As for Liu Bei, after more adventures he returned to Sichuan, there to found the third of the Three Kingdoms. Inevitably it was known as Shu. And thus as Shu, Wu and Wei, the intrepid adversaries of the Red Cliffs, and then their descendants, would continue their three-sided vendetta for control of China for another half-century.
Apart from heroic stature, Liu Bei possessed an asset that had not been much noticed in his youth: he had a doubtful claim to very distant descent from Han Jingdi (r. 157–141 BC), the Former Han emperor from whom Han Guang Wudi, founder of the Later Han, had also traced his descent. This connection lent credibility to Liu Bei’s 219 elevation as king of Shu (under the Later Han, kingship had been reserved exclusively for members of the Han family) and it became of special interest when, a year later, Cao Pi, son of Cao Cao of Wei, was reported to have replaced Han Xiandi as emperor. The news, by the time it reached Sichuan, may have become garbled, or perhaps Liu Bei simply misrepresented it. For he announced that Han Xiandi had in fact been killed and that Cao Pi was a usurper, but that the Han dynasty, far from being defunct, need only switch to another line of descent to find a successor – just as it had when the Later Han came to power. Indeed, following the usual rash of omens and impeccably argued entreaties, Liu Bei was persuaded that he himself was the lineal descendant chosen by Heaven. He performed the imperial rites of initiation, his ministers extended their whole-hearted support – in the terminology of the time, they were happy ‘as ducks in duckweed’ about it – and from then on Liu Bei, and then his son, reigned as the sometimes designated ‘Han-Shu emperors’ in Sichuan.6
But for Liu Bei of Han-Shu, as for Cao Pi of Wei and Sun Quan of Wu, acting the local emperor was no substitute for universal sovereignty. The assumption of imperial status prior to the conquest of the whole empire, though supposedly prophetic, proved merely provocative. Mocked by the Qin and Han traditions of unitary rule, none of the new dynasts could be confident of his legitimacy until he had eradicated the others. Only then could Heaven’s favour be taken as manifest, the dynastic changeover as complete, and posterity’s approval as assured. In effect, all three would be dynasties were condemned to fight on, so squandering their resources and alienating their subjects. To any but an already supreme ruler, the legacy of empire could be more curse than blessing.
The same could be said in respect of the historiographical tradition. Imperial history being premised on the idea of a single and near-continuous line of legitimate dynasties, later historians would feel obliged to prefer the claims of one of the Three Kingdoms over the other two. Thus the Standard Histories of the period written under the later Jin dynasty fav
our the Cao’s Wei dynasty, whom the Jin succeeded; so do other works written under the patronage of later northern dynasties, the Zizhi Tongjian being typical; all emphasise control of the empire’s core region along the Yellow River as essential in any claim to legitimacy. But histories written under the dispensation of the southern dynasties generally prefer the claims of Liu Bei’s Shu, or Han-Shu, dynasty. To them the superior virtue of a ruler like Liu Bei, plus his lineal descent from the illustrious Han, counted for more than geography. Thus it is that the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, which was based on a southern reading of events, makes Liu Bei its hero and emphasises his Heaven-favoured attributes. The crucial change of wind, for instance, that led to Cao Cao’s defeat at the Red Cliffs is seen not as a meteorological freak but as evidence of how Liu Bei’s virtue attracted the very best advisers, one of whom specialised in arranging these things direct with the gods.
Though there is much uncertainty about the authorship of the Romance, it has been argued that if, as seems probable, it was first written in the fourteenth century, it should also be read as a rejection of the then crumbling Mongol (or Yuan) dynasty by supporters of the incoming Ming dynasty. In this context it becomes a plea for the indigenous values and traditions of the Han – the people as well as the dynasty – against the claims of alien invaders from the north. By retrospective association, Cao Cao and his Wei dynasty get unjustly tarred as non-Han usurpers; and the greatest of national epics finds itself conscripted as nationalist propaganda. As ever, the writing of history, even of historical fiction, was itself a political act.