In China, from AD 88 to 182, a succession of children inherit the Han title, the palace eunuchs gain power, and the Yellow Turbans rise
BY AD 88, THE LAST YEAR of Mingdi’s son Zhangdi, the Han Dynasty had regained most of its former glory. The western states had been conquered almost as far as the Parthian border, and trade along the Silk Road had filled the empire with prosperity. Even the lack of a mature king to take Zhangdi’s place—at his death, his successor Hedi was only nine years old—did not seem a catastrophe, as it had been for that earlier phase of Han rule. China was lucky to have a good regent: Pan Ch’ao, the old soldier, who had been around since the days of Zhangdi’s father and knew as much about governing as any emperor.
In 91, at the age of twelve, Hedi ordered the palace eunuchs to kill off his mother’s relatives, who were trying to take advantage of his youth to muscle in on government offices. We can probably chalk this ruthlessness up to old Pan Ch’ao, who was watching out for his young charge, and who remembered that the Han Dynasty had once been overthrown by relatives of a dowager empress.
In any case, this was the first appearance on the scene of a new group of power-players: the palace eunuchs. The use of palace eunuchs to serve the royal family had been part of a strategy to assure the loyalty of the king’s servants; since they were castrated, they had no ambitions (theoretically) to seize land, wealth, or power on behalf of their children or clan. By some estimates, there were two thousand eunuchs at the Han court, and they had the emperor’s trust.1
Hedi died in 105, still in his twenties, with no legitimate heir; neither of his wives had become pregnant. One of the palace concubines did have a three-month-old son of the emperor’s; this baby, little Shangdi, died before he was a year old. The closest remaining relative was Hedi’s nephew Andi, who was twelve when he took the throne in 106. But unlike his uncle, he did not have the benefit of a watchful guardian. Pan Ch’ao had died in 102, after a lifetime of constant warfare that had taken him as far west as the Caspian Sea.2
Once again, powerful relatives moved behind the scene. Andi was married, while still a child, to the daughter of an ambitious official. After this, he was encouraged to leave the political decisions to his wife’s family.
Until 146, a whole succession of these too-young rulers were put on the throne by one ambitious noble family after another. Andi’s son Shundi was crowned in 125, at the age of ten; his son Chongdi was crowned when barely a year old, and died before he was three; he was followed by his own third cousin, the seven-year-old Zhidi, who was poisoned when he was eight and replaced by another cousin, fourteen-year-old Huandi.
During all these years, Han China was run by uncles, cousins, aunts, and anyone else who could get a finger into the pie. Huandi’s own policies were decided for him by his wife’s older brother, the ambitious Liang Ji, who had already been running the capital city Loyang for some years. Deprived of his power, Huandi retreated totally into the palace, ignoring all political decisions, refusing to sleep with his wife, and—as it turned out—cultivating the friendship of the palace eunuchs.
These eunuchs had been gaining more and more power, thanks to gradual shifts in their legal status. Some decades before, a royal eunuch had adopted a son, which was not all that uncommon. But when the eunuch died, he left his land to the adopted son. For the first time, the son was allowed to keep it. Two decades later, another eunuch was permitted to pass down an honorary title to his adopted son.3 These were not small changes. They allowed eunuchs to create a ruling clan of their own—one formed by adoptions rather than marriages, but a clan nonetheless. And like any clan, the palace eunuchs began to accumulate wealth, estates, and ambitions.
In 159, Huandi gave five eunuchs whose loyalty he had cultivated a job: they were to kill his brother-in-law, and he would reward them with both titles and land. His wife had just died, his blood ties to Liang Ji were broken, and he wanted his throne back.
The five eunuchs mobilized the palace guard and surrounded Liang Ji’s house. He killed himself before they could break in and get their hands on him, but the rest of his family was slaughtered. The purge spread out to the entire clan.
But the return of Huandi to power came too late. In the decades when regents dominated China, no one had been paying much attention to the state of the country at large. Unwatched, the merit system instituted by Guang Wudi had started to backfire. It had put the government of China’s provinces into the hands of trained and able men rather than aristocrats. But those able men were also ambitious. Many of them, over time, had seized the land of those who could not pay their taxes, and then had allowed the debtors to continue farming it.4
This was perfectly legal, and also more humane (and more productive) than throwing the debtors into prison. But as a result, government officials had accumulated wide tracts of land, worked by debtors who had become a new kind of feudal peasant. It was only human nature to pass that land on to sons and grandsons. Slowly, another network of powerful land-owning families had grown up. The names were different than those of the great families a century before, but the results were the same: wealthy landowners ran vast estates, and the poor farmers who worked the land had no power to protest their own low wages. The landowners had even begun to hire bands of security guards to keep their great estates safe—bands which grew to look more and more like private armies.5
At the same time, the opening of the road to the west brought in more and more trade. Merchants (who under the original Han system had been scorned as parasites and middlemen) were now able to make tremendous fortunes.6 This was a phenomenon lamented by the scholar Wang Fu, who died sometime around 165: in Qianfu lun, “Criticisms of a Hidden Man” (he had never won much in the way of official favors), in the chapter “On excessive luxury,” he complains that trade has replaced agriculture as the most profitable of occupations. And the trade was built partly on the backs of the poor laboring farmworkers, who had to pay higher and higher taxes so that the Silk Road could be kept up all the way west, and staffed with garrisons to keep merchant caravans safe from bandits.
Huandi did little to address any of these problems. He died in 168, leaving the throne and all of the Han Dynasty’s problems to his twelve-year-old son Lingdi.
Lingdi’s mother, the Empress Dowager Dou, was Huandi’s third wife. She served as her son’s regent, and since Lingdi was so young, she knew that she would be regent for some time. Her greatest worry was the power of the palace eunuchs, who had gained more and more wealth and power under Huandi’s rule. In fact, a group of palace eunuchs had formed themselves into something like a voluntary clan, crossed with a secret society: it was called the Ten Regular Attendants, and its members were committed to getting as much as they could from the emperor for themselves.
One of her advisors, the Confucian scholar Chen Fan, suggested that it would be safest for the empire if all the eunuchs were simply wiped out. Word of this advice got back to the eunuchs themselves. The Ten Regular Attendants and their allies stormed the palace, put the empress dowager under guard, and told young Lingdi that they had come to free him from his mother’s influence and keep him safe.
83.1 The Yellow Turbans
The empress dowager remained under guard for four years. When she died in 172, it was widely murmured that she had been murdered by Cao Jie, the leader of the Ten Regular Attendants. Meanwhile, Lingdi became so trusting of the Ten that he called another one of them, the much-hated Zhang Rang, by the honorary title “My Foster Father.”
No one was at the helm of Han China, and its economic woes were soon joined by natural disasters. Widespread sickness in 172 was followed first by flooding, and then by an invasion of locusts. In 177, an army campaign against the barbarians ended in disaster. Two years later, in 179, another epidemic swept across the country.
These were the sorts of omens that had brought Wang Mang’s new dynasty down. In his day, the Red Eyebrows had fought against the careless wealthy; now the cycle of violence began again. Now a new band of freedom fighters, the Yellow Turbans, took up the banner of the poor and downtrodden.
The Yellow Turbans were much more than a simple group of rebels: they were a millennial sect looking forward to the coming of a golden age. The millions of Chinese who lived unspeakably hard and grim lives were looking not just for political solutions, but for immediate hope. The Yellow Turbans offered exactly this. Their leader, a Daoist teacher named Chang Chueh, claimed that he had the power to do magic. He announced that he could heal sicknesses, a wonderful promise to a people who had just suffered through a horrendous epidemic. He promised that if they took his medicines, they would be immune from wounds and could fight in battle without fear, an equally marvelous notion for those who were vulnerable, underarmed, and weak with hunger.7
By 182, the Yellow Turbans had a following of over three hundred and fifty thousand poor, desperate, landless, and angry Chinese. By 184, they were ready to rise up and fight against their oppressors.
