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 instead 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, orhangtu, ‘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 resurrected 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.
Meanwhile, far to the west, Ma himself began grappling with the proto-Tibetan Qiang people. Between AD 35 and 39 he subdued the region from modern Xining to Kokonor and settled vast numbers of Qiang along and within this sector of the frontier. It was hoped that they would become taxable subjects as they forsook pastoralism in favour of sedentary farming; and for twenty years peace did indeed return to the area. But here, as along the northern frontier, a generation of instability had already prompted an exodus of the existing population. The ingress of non-Chinese only slewed the population balance still further, so that even within striking distance of Chang’an concentrations of Qiang and Xiongnu numerically challenged those indigenous descendants of the erstwhile Xia and Qin who may now be called ‘Han Chinese’. This would have unexpected consequences; the Qiang problem, unlike the Qiang themselves, was anything but settled.
General Ma’s next assignment could hardly have been farther away. In AD 40 revolt broke out in the south of Nanyue, or what is now northern Vietnam. For Ma it meant crossing the whole of China, exchanging near-tundra for tropics, raising a new army, and adapting the tactics of frontier patrolling to jungle warfare. The trouble was again ethnic, although it would acquire strong nationalist overtones. The indigenous Yue had risen against Han rule and more especially against Han immigration into the Red River basin. Whereas in the north of China Han settlers were retreating, in the south they were encroaching; a great population drift that over the next several centuries would change the whole pattern of Chinese demography was gathering pace.
Untroubled by such trends, Ma marched into Vietnam with overwhelming force, his supplies followed by sea from Guangdong, and the revolt was all over by the end of AD 43. But the written character for ‘Yue’ being read as ‘Viet’ in Vietnamese, and leadership of the Yue having fallen to two wildly courageous sisters (called Zheng in Chinese, Trung in Vietnamese), it was inevitable that later Vietnamese patriots would hail the revolt as the first ‘national uprising’ of an all too often oppressed people. Heavily romanticised, the story of Viet resistance to General Ma became a national epic rich in detail. It tells how one of the Boadicea-like Trung sisters rode into battle on elephant-back with her breasts flung over her shoulders like saddlebags – an arrangement that could be editorially glossed as the earliest authentic reference to the halter-neck top, or perhaps the brassiere. Chinese sources credit General Ma with extending to the Yue/Viet the opportunity of peaceful assimilation to Chinese ways and an end to their incorrigible tribalism. Certainly northern Vietnam underwent intensive sinicisation; and despite constant troubles, the next ‘national uprising’ would be a long time coming. In fact the Red River valley would remain under some form of Chinese rule for all of the ensuing millennium. But the Vietnamese prefer to forget this hiatus in their national struggle, and not surprisingly, temples dedicated to Ma Yuan are notably absent in Hanoi.
No sooner had General Ma reported back to Emperor Han Guang Wudi in Luoyang than he received another troubleshooting assignment, this time to the northern steppe-land on the Shanxi–Inner Mongolia frontier. There and throughout the ‘Great Wall’ borderlands the Xiongnu had taken advantage of the recent civil strife to stage a remarkable comeback. Partly through their own efforts, partly thanks to the erratic support of renegade Chinese warlords and of the nomadic Wuhuan and Xianbei peoples of the north-east, the Xiongnu had recovered practically all the territories once ruled by the great shanyu Maodun. Raiding parties were reaching what remained of the Former Han’s ancestral tombs near Chang’an and, far to the west, were threatening the ever loyal Wusun. The Ordos was back in Xiongnu control; so, to the west of it, were many of the oasis-cities of northern Xinjiang and, to the east of it, even the arable parts of Shanxi and Hebei.
The last of these was General Ma’s new theatre of operations. In AD 45 he set up headquarters west of where Beijing now stands. From there he marched north to Mongolia. But the Xiongnu evaded him, and in what was supposed to be a surprise raid on their Wuhuan allies, Ma himself was surprised. He lost a thousand cavalry, and though he remained in the region for another year, he did not again take the offensive. This could be because he did not need to. For in AD 46 the shanyu died, the succession was disputed, and the Xiongnu became the prey of their Wuhuan allies. ‘From the Chinese point of view’, writes Rafe de Crespigny, an authority on the northern frontier, ‘there was hardly any purpose in an aggressive policy while their enemies were carving one another up in such a satisfactory fashion.’16 Far from disgraced, General Ma moved on again. He would live to fight and die while suppressing yet another insurrection, his fourth, in northern Hunan.
Though by no means the end of the Xiongnu people as a frontier presence, the ructions over the shanyu’s succession in AD 46–49 sounded the death-knell of the Xiongnu state. Repeating events of exactly a hundred years earlier, in AD 51 one shanyu claimant finally turned to Luoyang for support and tendered his allegiance, plus a modest tribute. In return he received Han recognition plus decidedly less modest gifts – 10,000 bales of silk fabric, 2.5 tonnes of raw silk, 500,000 kilos of rice and 36,000 head of cattle. Tributaries never came cheap; in fact the shanyu of these ‘Southern Xiongnu’, in trading kowtows for commodities, and sovereignty for security, may have struck a better bargain than his ancestors under the old ‘peace-through-kinship’ treaties. Moreover, the gifts were just the first instalment of what was in effect an annual subsidy. By AD 91 the Southern Xiongnu were estimated to be costing the Han exchequer 100 million cash per year.
Nor were they the only beneficiaries of the Later Han’s policy of accommodation on the frontier. The Wuhuan and, on occasion, the Xianbei were also handsomely paid for assisting the Han, whether against the still-hostile ‘Northern Xiongnu’ or against one another. Perhaps as many as 3 million Wuhuan were eventually settled within the frontier. The Han army welcomed the addition of their fearsome cavalry, while the Wuhuan welcomed a subsidised existence like that of the Southern Xiongnu. It was different with the Xianbei (Xianbi, Sarbi). Having assisted the Han in driving off the Northern Xiongnu in AD 91, they proceeded to fill the Mongolian void left by this Xiongnu exodus. By the second half of the second century AD the Xianbei headed a new nomadic confederacy that would pose an even greater threat to the Later Han than had the once united Xiongnu.
All these frontier peoples merit more consideration than the mostly Chinese sources permit. Tomb paintings discovered in Inner Mongolia portray them as shaven-headed, sometimes with a Mohican tuft, and shabbily dressed. The Wuhuan and Xianbei seem to have originated in eastern Mongolia or western Manchuria, though their ethnic identification as ‘proto-Mongol’ is more tentative than that of the Qiang as ‘proto-Tibetan’. They lived in tents, herded livestock and were good on horseback. More critically, as a result of Luoyang’s accommodating policies, they (plus the Qiang) came to occupy vast areas within the north, north-west and north-east frontiers of the Later Han empire.
For the Han they were a mixed blessing. Tributaries had been won, and the northern frontier had been returned to where it had stood under the Early Han. But the cost was great. It was argued that subsidies were cheaper than the military campaigns and garrisons that would otherwise be necessary. Yet incorporating alien populations that resented discrimination from their Han neighbours (though in many areas they outnumbered them) would have devastating consequences. Though initially illiterate and alien to all that constituted Chinese civilisation, the Qiang, Xiongnu, Wuhuan and Xianbei would come to play a decisive role in the post-Han period. In that age of warring kingdoms, they, just like the men of Chu and Qin in the earlier ‘Warring States’ period, would be invited into the central plain as mercenaries and then power-brokers. Insinuating themselves among the peoples who today consider themselves Han Chinese, the alien ‘tributaries’ would infuse the indigenous mainstream. Thereafter the flow of China’s history would be as much theirs as that of their erstwhile Han enemies.
As for the ‘Western Regions’, that appendage of island-oases and intersecting silk-ways beyond the Gansu corridor in Xinjiang, the Later Han were ambivalent. For nearly half a century (AD 25–73) no attempt was made to reclaim the area. Suche (Yarkand), the principal kingdom in the extreme south-west of Xinjiang, attained a brief hegemony over the other oasis-states, but the Northern Xiongnu were soon raiding and trading at will throughout the region. Colonies established by the Early Han remained in a state of siege – if they remained at all; and the ‘Jade Gateway’ to the Silk Road near Dunhuang was more often barred than open. None of this, however, prompted speedy action. For in retrospect those long-distance exchanges of the previous century, which the Chinese had habitually characterised as tribute and the tributaries as trade, looked less worthwhile. At one point the two-way traffic along the silk trails had grown so heavy as to be almost continuous. Yet its prestige value to the Han court had declined. The system, it seems, was being too much abused.
The point was well made in a report on relations with Kashmir. Here was a country, south of Xinjiang and on the other side of two of the world’s highest mountain chains, that was clearly beyond the reach of Han arms. It was almost beyond the reach of Han emissaries. Supplies were unobtainable on the mountain trails, a military escort was essential to discourage bandits, and such was the effect of the extreme altitudes that the Kun Lun and Karakoram mountains were known to the Chinese as ‘the ranges of the Greater and Lesser Headache’. For long stretches the trail – it probably followed the Hunza, Gilgit and Indus rivers – narrowed to ledges less than 45 centimetres (18 inches) wide. Travellers had to rope themselves together. ‘The danger of the precipices beggars description,’ said the report. Yet for the best part of a century substantial missions had been scrambling back and forth, often annually, to pledge fealty on behalf of the Kashmiris and to confer titles on behalf of the emperor. In both directions they also carried merchandise – woollens, embroidery and Indian produce from Kashmir, large consignments of silk from China. Secure in their Himalayan fastness, the Kashmiris brooked no interference in their internal affairs and massacred one Han mission that tried. But apologies had followed, the protestations of loyalty continued, and the exchanges had resumed. Inveterate traders to this day, the Kashmiris were clearly using the Han tributary system and the protection that it afforded to conduct purely commercial activities. As the report puts it, ‘envoys sent out on missions to carry the commands of the emperor’ were being diverted ‘to escort the merchants of the barbarians’.17
It was not tribute or trade which tempted the Han back into Xinjiang but the Xiongnu. In AD 73, 74 and 77 military expeditions launched from Gansu against the Northern Xiongnu pursued them deep into Mongolia and reoccupied the northern Xinjiang oases of Turfan and Hami. Ban Chao, the brother of the Hanshu’s authors, took part in these forays, and it was he who in the AD 90s famously led a series of further expeditions that re-established Han supremacy throughout Xinjiang. As Protector-General of the Western Regions, an office defunct since the conquests of the Early Han, Ban Chao supervised the resettlement of Han colonies along the silk routes and renewed contacts with the states of central Asia. In AD 97 a mission under his subordinate, Kan Ying, was dispatched to ‘Da Qin’, a distant realm with an apparently insatiable appetite for Chinese silk. It was probably the Roman empire, albeit its eastern provinces. Sadly the encounter that might have resulted was pre-empted by the mission’s detention in Parthia, whose merchants, like those of Sogdiana (Samarkand), had a vested interest in excluding competitors from the overland trade.
Han horizons, which had been at their most expansive in the early first century BC under the Former Han, seemed to be reopening in the late first century AD under the Later Han. On the other side of China in North Korea, twentieth-century discoveries of richly endowed Han tombs have substantiated a patchy textual record of conquests and commanderies in the Korean peninsula which date from Han Wudi’s time. But with no external threat from this quarter, Han pretensions ebbed and flowed without provoking much comment. Their effect was more notable in terms of acculturation. Confucian values and useful Chinese achievements, such as literacy and paper-making (developed in the first and second centuries AD), passed down the Korean peninsula and across the Tsushima Strait. In AD 57, and again in 107, Luoyang entertained its first recorded visitors from Kyushu in the Japanese archipelago. At almost exactly the same time, Han texts make their first mention of a revered teacher who was called ‘Fo’ in China but ‘The Buddha’ in India. From the Sea of Japan to the Ganges and the Tiber, Han China’s horizons now spanned the Eurasian landmass.
They soon retracted. The Han administrations in Korea were forced back into Liaodong province in the early second century ad, and all the Western Regions were abandoned – again – soon after. The main reason in the case of the latter was the cost of maintaining so many tributary statelets and far-flung colonies. But renewed trouble with the Qiang in the Gansu corridor threatened access to the region and was a contributory factor. The Qiang revolts came thick and fast. By AD 168 the Han had been forced to withdraw from three of Gansu’s commanderies, so narrowing its famous ‘corridor’ to little more than a crack. Proposals to withdraw completely from the whole of eastern Gansu were canvassed but met with strong resistance, most notably from Gansu itself. When in AD 184 the whole region erupted again in rebellion, its Han population would make common cause with their Qiang and Xiongnu neighbours. One rebel group even adopted the title ‘Ping Han’, meaning ‘Pacifying the Han’. The dynasty itself now became the target, and under Dong Zhuo, one of Gansu’s king-making leaders, this Gansu revolt would ‘play a key role in the decline and fall of the Han empire’.18