Ch 2 - Tales of Three Kingdoms

Descent from Heaven

The Earlier Han Dynasty, weakened by a succession of dysfunctional emperors, fell to Wang Mang, who created the short-lived and disastrous Hsin Dynasty.

The declining quality of monarchs following Emperor Wu's reign led some Confucian scholars to declare openly that the Han Dynasty had lost its Mandate from Heaven. The belief became widespread, particularly after Emperor Ngai, the last emperor of the Former Han Dynasty, ascended the throne as Cheng Di's successor. Ngai Di, it seems, enjoyed living in the company of homosexual boys, one of whom he appointed commander-in-chief of his armies. The pleasure-seeking emperor ruled only twelve years.

In 9 AD, the palace at Changan came under the domination of the family of Yuan-di's widow, who replaced Ngai Di on the throne with a two year-old and appointed her nephew, Wang Mang, regent over the infant ruler. Wang was a Confucianist, a member of a consort family with a reputation for Confucian virtues and a talent for intrigue. Hoping to see China once again under the rule of moral purpose, many Confucianists looked to him for leadership. Some looked to him to create a new dynasty. Encouraged by such widespread support, within a year Wang Mang arranged for the abdication of the infant emperor, declared himself emperor and brought the Han Dynasty to an end. He soon began a long struggle for recognition of his legitimacy.

Following his enthronement, Wang Mang proclaimed the beginning of the Xin (New) Dynasty. Hoping to win support from commoners by reforms, Emperor Wang dramatically announced the recent discovery of books written by Confucius, supposedly found when Confucius' house had been torn down more than two hundred years before . He claimed he was doing what the first Zhou king or Confucius would do if they were in his position. In accordance with the writings in his "Confucian scripture," he decreed a return to that golden age when every man had his measure of land to till - land that in principle belonged to the state. Families with fewer than eight members that owned over fifteen acres were obligated to distribute the excess acreage to those without land.

Emperor Wang moved to reduce the tax burden on peasants and devised a plan where the state would lend money to anyone in need at only ten percent interest compared to the usurious thirty-percent rate being charged by private lenders. In an attempt to discourage wealthy individuals from hoarding grain and profiting from price fluctuations, the emperor made plans to create state-sponsored granaries in order to stabilize prices by instituting a "leveling" program. The government bought surplus commodities when prices fell and sold them when scarcity caused prices to rise. He also appointed officials to regulate the economy and to fix prices every three months, adding that critics of his plan would be drafted into the military.

The Xin dynasty was an unmitigated disaster from the start. Emperor Wang Mang believed that his subjects would obey his decrees. To succeed however, he needed more than a belief. He needed a broad base of loyal support and a strong force to move against those who violated his land reform laws. Unfortunately, he remained too timid and too attached to his pacifistic idealism to make his plans work. Among the wealthy aristocracy, particularly the large land-owners, Confucianism took a back seat to their interest in holding and increasing their personal wealth. Many of the wealthy merchants employed by the government to implement the reforms quickly succumbed to bribery and spent most of their time enriching themselves. Furthermore, with no means of mass communication available to spread the word, local people remained totally unaware of the emperor's reforms. Instead of mobilizing a large peasant army to enforce his decrees, Emperor Wang soon discovered that the great land owners had begun mobilizing a peasant army against him.

By 10 AD, Emperor Wang faced the emergence of a well-organized and disciplined peasant movement led by a former brigand chief in Shandong Province near the mouth of the Yellow River. In Hebei Province, yet another rebellion arose and soon their were revolts underway across China. Landlords led some of these rebellious peasant armies, and one in particular was led by a Han prince named Liu Xiu. Peasant armies murdered and plundered their way across the North China Plain. Emperor Wang ordered his troops against the peasant armies, but even they turned against him, either joining the rebels or engaging in wild sprees of looting and plundering, taking what little food they could find.

The failed reforms and peasant unrest were too much for Emperor Wang. When he attempted to deal with the revolts by endless elaboration of Confucian rituals and new regulations, he merely alienated his supporters. The unrest in China was amplified by a great natural disaster in 11 AD, when the massive dike system holding the mighty Yellow River in its channel to the sea collapsed. Devastating floods spread from Shandong Province to the river's mouth on the Gulf of Bo Hai, killing hundreds of thousands of people and creating a huge, wandering mass of starving and desperate peasants. The government had failed, as usual, to provide enough grain storage for hard times and the situation quickly degenerated into a widespread famine.

Not only threatened at home, Emperor Wang still faced a growing Xiungnu threat along his northern frontier as well. He viewed the Korean kingdom of Koguryo, now firmly established north of the Yalu River, and the Xiungnu as potential threats to his short-lived Xin Dynasty. The Chinese saw the growing strength of the confederated kingdom of Puyo in Manchuria as an added menace. Ironically, the rulers of Puyo also saw themselves in a precarious position. They had long had hostile relationships with Koguryo to the south and the emerging Xianbei to the north, a nomadic tribe that developed as an independent power near the Khingan Mountains in the upper Amur River basin.

Hoping to channel some of Koguryo's aggressive energy, Emperor Wang issued orders in 12 AD that tribal warriors should take part as auxiliaries in a military campaign against the Xiungnu. Rather than fight the Xiungnu, the Koguryo warriors reconsidered their position. They turned against the Chinese and murdered a local Chinese governor in the ensuing revolt. The Chinese military could not suppress the resulting violent flash of tempers that quickly flared into a general revolt against Chinese authority. Stunned and angered, the Chinese military district commander invited a tribal leader from Koguryo to a meeting ostensibly to discuss the situation. Chinese troops promptly murdered him when he arrived. This episode marked not just the first overt act against a foreign power by Koguryo, but it marked the beginning of a truly independent kingdom.

The combined effects of peasant unrest, natural disaster and widespread famine took a terrible toll on the population. By 14 AD, cannibalism became an option for some desperate to survive. Man's basic goodness, the strongly held belief of Confucianists, appeared to have vanished. Since Wang Mang had come to the Celestial Throne as a sage, the Chinese saw all these disasters as Heaven proving him to be a fake. Finally convinced that his reforms had failed, Emperor Wang withdrew the program, but it really no longer mattered. Armed and determined resistance to his rule had already begun.

Various peasant groups merged in 18 AD to form a large rebel army known as the "Red Eyebrows," so-called because of their distinctive bright red mark (red was the cosmological color of the Han Dynasty). Prince Liu Xiu and his clan descendants were laying plans to reclaim the Celestial Throne and reestablish the Han Dynasty. As the Xin Dynasty slowly collapsed on itself, angry peasants marched toward the capital, killing government officials along the way. In 23 AD, a large rebel army poured into the Wei River valley, where they sacked and burned China's great capital city of Changan. Rebel soldiers found Emperor Wang Mang in his throne room, calmly reciting from his collection of Confucian writings, perhaps still trying to cast some magic spell to halt the advance of the enemy armies. One soldier silenced the emperor's voice by decapitating him in mid-sentence. In the end, Wang Mang seems to have been more a victim of the social demand for a sage ruler and his own self-delusions than a cynical fraud.

Wang Mang died without a designated heir to the throne and for the next five years vicious fighting in China resulted in millions of deaths as rival factions battled each other for power. Prince Liu Xiu of the royal Liu family led the most successful faction. Popular among his troops and people with whom he had contacts, Prince Liu surrounded himself with educated men. His army was the only group that did not loot a captured town and his leadership ability won the hearts and minds of those conquered. Liu Xiu took control over the conquered capital city of Changan in 28 AD, proclaimed himself Emperor Guang Wu and restored the Han Dynasty. Shortly afterward, he moved the capital to the city of Luoyang, which his forces also controlled. Liu Xiu spent the next eleven years combating rivals, absorbing some groups of Red Eyebrow rebels into his army and killing thousands more.

Ironically, the reforms Wang Mang tried to peacefully accomplish during his life came to pass violently after his death. So many people died in the upheaval that ended the Xin Dynasty that land became available to literally anyone who wanted to own a piece of China. The vast number of money lenders among the dead freed vast numbers of peasants from debt. Emperor Guang Wu helped the ravaged economy by lowering taxes by as much as he thought possible, down to as little as one tenth or one thirteenth of a farmer's profits or harvest.

During his thirty-two year reign, Liu Xiu promoted scholarship and curtailed the influence of eunuchs and others around the royal family. He defended China's western and northern borders by launching successful military campaigns on these frontiers, pushing back the Xiungnu, enabling him to take control of Sinkiang in extreme northwestern China. Though once considered a major threat by Wang Mang's Xin Dynasty, the Kingdom of Puyo had long desired friendly ties with China. Puyo envoys arrived at the court of Emperor Guang Wu in 49 AD seeking cordial relations with the Eastern Han Dynasty.

With Chinese support assured, Puyo sought first to preserve then expand its sovereign power. China came to welcome the rise of Puyo, largely because the kingdom lay on the Manchurian Plain between the Xianbei on China's northern frontier and Koguryo to China's northeast. Throughout its history, Puyo defended itself against the incursions of Koguryo and the Xianbei nomads by reaching accommodation with a succession of Chinese states. With his northeastern flank secured, Emperor Guang Wu tightened China's grip on the area around the Liao River and northern Korea, eventually expanding control over all that had been China. The restored Han dynasty appeared to have the won back the Mandate of Heaven.

Koguryo's founder, Chu-mong, had three sons:  Crown Prince Yuri by his first wife, and princes Piryu and Onjo by his second wife. After Prince Yuri ascended the Koguryo throne in 19 BC, his two brothers, their families, and a number of former Puyo refugees left the area and traveled south and west into the Mahan territory. The following year, Prince Onjo settled in the city-state of Paekche, (Boji in Chinese), one of the Ma-han's 55 small town states. Prince Piryu separately established another state in the region.

Being foreigners from the far north, the royal family, court nobility, and ruling administrators took great care to maintain their distance from commoners as if to reinforce the distinction between themselves and the local population. Puyo's aristocracy did not command the loyalty of the Mahan people, in fact their very way of life made that a near impossibility. They lived separate from everyone else in great castles built by the forced labor of local peasants. These castles housed not only residences, but military headquarters and tax collection offices as well. The nobility cared little about actually governing the population. Their real interest lay in collecting taxes from the peasants. Toward that end, they enlisted the aid of influential locals as administrative retainers and authorized them to collect taxes. This the retainers did willingly, and twice;  once for the nobility and once for themselves.

Gradually, Prince Onjo and his descendants brought the villages of Mahan under their control and formed the new Kingdom of Paekche. Even though Paekche possessed rich agricultural lands, a warm climate and a large population, it never developed a very strong culture, economy, or significant military presence. Under the leadership of the Puyo royal lineage from Manchuria, Paekche represented a kingdom of alien rule. For centuries, a large segment of the heavily taxed population had been worked as slaves in the fields and generally exploited by local ruling aristocracies. Because Paekche's native population had no experience in self-government, the people of Paekche, particularly those who lived along the southwest coast, lived under Chinese rule longer than any other group in Korea. Never in its entire existence did Paekche have its own native rulers.

By the beginning of the 1st century AD, Koguryo had developed to the point where King Yuri-myong felt strong enough to break out of his territorial confines in all directions. His armed horsemen rode southwest across the Liaodong Peninsula into the Liao River basin and south to the Taedong River. Koguryo rapidly conquered and dominated Han China's military districts and the outlying territory that lay within China's sphere of influence. Koguryo warriors pushed northwest into the Puyo territory of the Sungari River basin and southeast across the Kaema Plateau onto the plains of Korea's northeast coast, where the Okcho and Eastern Ye held a tenuous position. The emergence and subsequent expansion of Koguryo became particularly unsettling to the Chinese who saw in Koguryo a new and growing danger to their northeastern frontier.