AS THE LAST CENTURY OF THE Pre-Christian era wound down, any fin de siècle forebodings troubled China more than they did the Mediterranean world. Rome was entering its Augustan age; peace had been restored after the civil strife of the triumvirate period, Octavian was being hailed as both emperor (‘Caesar’) and deity (‘Augustus’), and the legions were about to triumph from Scotland to the Yemen. But in China the celebrations were over; retrenchment was the order of the day. Han troops would never again tramp across the high Pamirs into central Asia, nor take for granted Vietnam, whose first of many ‘wars of independence’ was about to erupt. In Chang’an the great public spectacles of Han Wudi’s reign – military parades, tribute receptions and athletic meetings like those of Qin – had been either scaled down or abolished. Imperial hunting grounds were being neglected; stables stood empty as the emperor’s equestrian establishment was halved. Hundreds of musicians and dancers had been dismissed as surplus to ritual requirement. The textile workshops in Shandong that had supplied the court with robes and furnishings had been shut down completely.
By AD 1 the Han dynasty had been in power for over two hundred years. Han Gaozu (the ‘Great Progenitor’) had reunited the empire, and under Han Wudi its borders had been so extended as to negate any immediate threat of incursion. Between and since, several model emperors had presided over long periods of peace, prosperity and progress. The cap-doffing ‘Confucian’ scholars so despised by the ‘Great Progenitor’ had become the pride of his progeny; and in the hands of such cultured bureaucrats, the administration comfortably controlled a population as large as that in thrall to Rome. The august Octavian, who was making administrative reform his own priority, would have despaired had he had any inkling of the intricate checks and balances of the Han bureaucratic apparatus.
But of late it did seem that the Han dynasty had enjoyed less in the way of celestial favour. From the mid-first century BC discouraging portents had begun to outnumber the encouraging ones, and by Han Chengdi’s reign (33–7 BC) their message, as interpreted by Confucian reformists, amounted to a disturbing indictment. Summarising the situation in his translation of the Ban family’s Hanshu, editor Homer Dubs calls this catalogue of catastrophes ‘unique’: ‘fires, comets, eclipses, fogs, flies, droughts, floods, earthquakes, avalanches, murders, meteors, and thunders dot the pages of the [Hanshu’s] chapter [on Chengdi], few years being without several such visitations’.1 Not even the reviled Qin First and Second Emperors had been quite so afflicted with ill omens. Dynastic change was in the stars, on the breeze and underfoot.
Omens could of course be contrived, exaggerated or misinterpreted, but an incontrovertible sign of celestial displeasure was the lack of legitimate heirs. Three successive emperors had failed to produce direct successors. Short of advertising the Mandate for tender, Heaven could scarcely have made its disquiet clearer. Heirs being as important as ancestors, a dynasty that failed in this fundamental responsibility was in dire jeopardy. It was alleged that Chengdi had in fact sired two boys by a concubine; if so, they had been murdered to oblige a more favoured consort who herself then failed to bear a son. Aidi certainly had no heirs; he was not so inclined. And likewise poor little Pingdi, for he never quite attained puberty. Following the example of Huo Guang as regent forHanZhaodi, Wang Mang provided Pingdi with one of his daughters as empress; but in AD 6, when he was still only fourteen, Pingdi fell ill and died.
By now all of Han Yuandi’s male descendants had been exhausted. It was therefore a question of going back another generation to Han Xuandi and selecting a candidate from among his male descendants. Of these there were many and of all ages; five of them had been enfeoffed as kings according to the Hanshu, and forty-eight as marquises. But Wang Mang was unimpressed by this royal regiment. In opting for its most recent recruit, a one-year-old babe who was named Ruzi (‘the infant prince’), he claimed to be acting in accordance with a doubtful tradition that required a new emperor to come from the generation after that of his predecessor. With copious references to the Duke of Zhou’s impeccable example, to Confucius’s endorsement of it (‘I am for the Zhou’) and to his own recent appointment as ‘the Duke Giving Tranquillity to the Han Dynasty’, Wang Mang contrived his advance from regent for the deceased Pingdi to regent and acting emperor for the mewling Ruzi (AD 6).
He pledged to stand down when Ruzi came of age, but the choice of so young a prince left little doubt that the now acting emperor was bent on becoming the next actual emperor. Favourable portents said as much, some of them so bluntly that they should perhaps be seen more as ritual reassurance than as an exercise in public deception; they included a prophetic letter sealed within a copper casket, an inscription hidden in a rock, and a very vivid dream reported by a Han relative. Auspicious items of tribute received at about this time – a live rhinoceros, a white pheasant and ‘a stone ox from Ba’ (in Sichuan, where the fashion for carved cattle apparently continued) – provided further encouragement. Most convincing of all was the ease with which objectors were being silenced and Han loyalists confounded. Heaven’s approval of Wang Mang was being made manifest through the empire’s concurrence.
The Wangs already enjoyed powerful support built up over three generations. In addition, Wang Mang himself was backed by fellow Confucian fundamentalists who welcomed the idea of a scholar-sage in their own image replacing an apparently compromised lineage. Heaven’s intentions with regard to the Mandate seemed clear enough; and the chances for a peaceful transfer, the first on record, looked good. Hence it was that, after a decent interval full of encouraging memorials, on 10 January AD 9 at the tomb-temple ofHan Gaozu, and with the blessing of the now eighty-something Grand Dowager Empress Wang, Wang Mang formally ‘accepted the resignation’ of the Han and was entrusted with the imperial seals. Little Ruzi was returned to the nursery none the worse for his two years as heir apparent, and the new emperor issued his first proclamation.
By portents and credentials, designs and writings, a metal casket and a written charter, the gods have proclaimed that they entrust me with the myriad common people of the empire . . . [Han] Gaozu received a mandate from Heaven and has transmitted the state [to me by] a writing on a metal charter. I wear the royal hat and ascend the throne as the actual Son of Heaven. It is fixed that the title [of my dynasty] in possessing the empire shall be Xin.2
‘Xin’ means ‘new’, and perhaps this is what Wang Mang intended. But a ‘New Dynasty’, besides being a statement of the obvious, scarcely chimed with its founder’s Confucian purpose of restoring the old. More convincingly, editor Dubs derives ‘Xin’ from Xin-du, the fief of which Wang Mang was marquis. Just as Liu Bang (Han Gaozu) had named his dynasty after his prior kingdom of Han, so Wang Mang was naming his after his marquisate of Xin-du.3 As ever, it was precedent, not expediency, which mattered most to the one-man dynasty that was Wang Mang.
Practically everything that is known of Wang Mang’s reign comes from the Hanshu. None of it is favourable, and nor could it be; for Wang Mang had to be discredited in the historical record. His overthrow in AD 23, the restoration of the Han in AD 25 and the two more centuries of Han rule that would follow meant that he could be portrayed only as a usurping impostor. Instead of occupying his place after Pingdi in the Hanshu’s chronological annals of the emperors, he is relegated to a biographical memoir at the end of the text. Lack of legitimacy was meant to be inferred from this and would never subsequently be questioned; the Xin dynasty was forever banished from imperial China’s legitimate dynastic succession.
Historiographical convention demanded that Wang Mang be exorcised; therefore he must first be demonised. On page after page he is caricatured as an unctuous and manipulative hypocrite whose vanity and indecision were as disastrous for the empire as they were for himself. Parsimonious or extravagant, indulgent or vindictive, aggressive or conciliatory, his every action is seen purely in personal terms and condemned as a failure of character. The Ban family, who compiled the Hanshu, had good reasons of their own for bad-mouthing Wang Mang: he had dismissed one of them from office, and they were writing under the restored Han, to whom the Bans were indebted and Wang Mang was anathema. But there may, too, have been an ideological consideration. For it could hardly be denied that Wang Mang was a knowledgeable and dedicated Confucian. No text was left unquoted in his memorials and pronouncements; no edict was issued without some compelling reference to the past, especially to the Zhou kings. Indeed, the Zhouli, a text of the third century BC that had supposedly been written eight centuries earlier by the Duke of Zhou himself, was now accorded classic status. Wang Mang’s reign, according to the modern historian Ch’en Ch’i-yün, ‘marked the climax of Han Confucian idealism’.4 But how then could it have gone so disastrously wrong? Since Confucianism could not possibly be to blame, the fault must lie in Wang Mang himself. Confucius had emphasised that, in setting an example of righteousness and benevolence, the ruler must be sincere. Obviously Wang Mang was not. His ideas might be sound and his scholarship formidable but, according to the Hanshu, they were fatally compromised by a venal and cynical nature.
At first all had gone well. In a flurry of directives, slavery (though never that common) was abolished, the sale of land was forbidden, orders were issued for the break-up and redistribution of large estates, and there was a move towards the restoration of the Zhou’s idealised ‘well-field’ system of peasant landholdings (whereby eight families each held an equal area of land within a ditched grid, somewhat like a boxed ‘noughts-and-crosses’ graph, the spare square in the middle being held in common). These were brave initiatives aimed at redressing inequality and reinstating a traditional economy based on a self-sufficient peasantry. They ought to have won the approval of both precedent-minded historians and later social reformers. But in fact even twentieth-century revolutionaries would be little tempted to rehabilitate Wang Mang. Chiang Kai-shek, the Nationalist leader, would deplore the Marxist construction that could be put on the egalitarian ‘well-field’ system. Marxists were equally uncomfortable with it because of its ‘feudal’ context.5
Indifferent to the future, Wang Mang pushed ahead with reviving the past. The rankings system was rejigged, all ranks renamed, old nobilities reintroduced, and old names preferred for all existing posts in the administration and for all the provincial commanderies and counties. The calendar was readjusted, the time of day recalibrated, and the geography of China rectified so as to conform with a traditional concept of ‘all within the four seas’. This meant, for instance, conflating Qinghai’s Lake Kokonor into an ocean and naming both it and its near-Tibetan hinterland as ‘Xihai’, ‘the Western Sea’.
No one could accuse the new emperor of dragging his feet. ‘By nature irascible and irritable,’ according to the Hanshu, ‘he would not content himself with wuwei [‘inaction’] . . . he always wanted every [initiative] to be in accordance with ancient practices, and sought some classic text as authority’. Confucius had demonstrated how, by studying the canonical texts and cultivating benevolence, a just moral order might be restored. But Confucius had been denied the chance of actually putting his ideas into effect. Wang Mang now had that chance. To create a Confucian utopia, or taiping (an era of ‘heavenly peace’ as outlined in the Zhouli), a prerequisite was the ‘rectification of names’. Getting the names of things right was as important as the precise orientation and orchestration of ceremonies, or the synchronisation of the calendar with the seasons and the lunar phases. If names corresponded to their anciently ordained realities, cosmic order would be restored, the forces of yin and yang would be brought into equilibrium, the Five Elements/Phases correctly aligned, and Heaven’s favour ensured.
Conversely, inappropriate names could only bring disaster. When the troops fared badly, it must be because their generals were handicapped by operational misnomers. Likewise when civil unrest broke out, the affected commanderies obviously needed to be reconfigured and their names revised – again. Wang Mang took full responsibility. ‘He pondered deeply’ and invariably concluded that ‘the blame lies in titles not being correct’. On one occasion, he elevated two of his sons to royal status in the belief that Heaven required reassurance about the Xin dynasty’s succession; as he explained, ‘in this way, without [the empire], the barbarians of the four quarters will be driven away and, within, zhongguo will be pacified’.6
But while the effect of these changes was more bewildering than disastrous, his economic policies were potentially catastrophic. His four reformations of the coinage (including the reintroduction of archaic currencies such as ‘spade-money’ and cowrie shells), his ‘Five Equalisations’ (designed to stabilise prices and provide rural credit) and his ‘Six Monopolies’ (forest produce was added to the usual list of iron, salt, liquor, etc.) may have been well intentioned. Although state monopolies had been a Confucian target in theDiscourses on Salt and Iron, all these measures could be seen as discouraging speculative enterprise in favour of honest small-scale farming, the bedrock of Confucian economics. But in practice they caused chaos and distress. Most were swiftly adjusted or rescinded, though not before corrupt officials, hoarders and counterfeiters had had a field day.
Naturally Confucian studies were heavily promoted. The imperial academy opened its doors to ever more examination candidates and ever more examining ‘erudites’; a colony with housing for 10,000, a market and a granary were established for them in Chang’an. The now six (with the addition of the Zhouli) classic texts were further scrutinised and collated, various commentaries on them assessed, and an official ‘libationer’ enjoying the highest of bureaucratic rankings was appointed for each text. It is said that the practice of conferring honorary titles on Confucius himself dates from this period and likewise the worship of his memory.7
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