Duke Chong of Former Liang

In the intercalary eighth month of 363 a boy of fourteen was killed inside his own palace in Guzang, and the government announced that he had died of a sudden illness. The man who ordered it was his uncle, who was eighteen. The boy had held the province for eight years, since he was seven, and in that time the record gives him almost nothing to do.
Five men held him in those eight years, one after another, and four of them died in the office or on the way out of it. The fifth killed him. That is the whole of his politics, and it is not, in the first place, the story of a cruel ruler. It is the story of an office that had no lawful way to end.

1. The Hall

In the summer of 355 Zhang Zuo, who had taken the seat from Xuanjing's elder brother two years before, moved against his strongest commander and missed. Zhang Guan held Hezhou and the fortress at Fuhan, the southern gate of the province. Zhang Zuo sent a replacement governor and thirteen thousand men under Yi Chuai and Zhang Ling to see that the replacement took effect. Zhang Guan killed the new governor, came out of Fuhan, and sent a proclamation through the province: the ruler was unfit, and the deposed boy Yaoling should be restored.
Song Hun, a cavalry general from Dunhuang whose elder brother had quarrelled with Zhang Zuo, expected to be made to answer for the quarrel. He left the capital with his brother Cheng, raised more than ten thousand men in the west, and turned back toward Guzang. Zhang Zuo answered in the way such men answer. In the eighth month he had Yaoling killed.
By the intercalary month Song Hun's army was outside the wall. Zhang Ju and Zhang Song, the general's brother and son, hired several hundred men in the market, went through the streets shouting that the army was already at the east gate, and opened the west gate to it.
What followed was less a coup than a clerical act performed at speed. Zhao Chang, the general of the palace guard, and the officers about him had served Zhang Zuo and expected to be killed for it. They went into the inner hall, brought out Lady Ma, and had her name the younger son of Chonghua. Xuanjing was seven. Zhao Chang struck first; the dynastic history has the emperor stabbed in the forehead and finished by a cook, the mirror has him cut down where he stood with a sword. Either way the guard had stopped listening. He was buried as a commoner, and his two sons were killed.
Song Hun and Zhang Ju then ratified what the palace had done. They raised the boy to general-in-chief, governor of Liangzhou and duke of Xiping, declared an amnesty, and abolished the era of the man they had killed; the province went back to the forty-third year of Jianxing. The title he held was a Jin one, conferred by officers who had fled a fallen capital; a state that governs under another state's commission has not decided what it is.
The chapter's verb for the boy's new titles is "styled himself", which is what an annalist writes about a usurper. It is applied here to a child who had been in the hall for one afternoon.
Zhang Guan arrived from Fuhan soon afterwards and found a boy on the seat and the regency vacant. He took it, and he took the boy up with it: Xuanjing became king of Liang, while Zhang Guan took the secretariat, the army command and the governorship. Song Hun, who had done the fighting, was made assistant director of the secretariat.
In one autumn the boy had been made a duke by one set of men and a king by another, and nobody had asked him. The title was not a description of him. It was a receipt, and every man who took power in Guzang collected one.

2. The Regent at Fuhan

Zhang Guan's four years are remembered for two things: the province came apart at its edges, and he said something about tigers.
The edges went first. In Longxi a strongman named Li Yan held his commandery and dated his documents by the living emperor's era in Jiankang. That was the one thing no officer of Liang did. The province had been writing a dead man's year for four decades, and Li Yan's use of a live one was a claim to be the only loyal man in it. Zhang Guan sent a general against him, who lost. In Xiping, Wei Chen rose; the two houses each held the other's brother, so for a year neither attacked, until a man who read the sky told Wei Chen that the Zhangs were due to fall. Wei Chen attacked and was beaten by Zhang Guan's brother Ju.
None of this was a rebellion against the boy. It was the ordinary weather of a province that could no longer enforce anything at a distance.
In 356 the Former Qin sent two envoys, Yan Fu and Liang Shu, to ask what Liang thought it was. Zhang Guan laughed and said that this was a matter for the king, not for him. The envoys had come prepared for that answer. The king, they said, is precocious but young; you hold the position of Yi Yin and Huo Guang; the safety of the state turns on one move of yours. Zhang Guan was afraid. He submitted in the boy's name, and Qin confirmed the titles the boy had already assumed.
The envoys had described the constitution more exactly than any edict: there was a king, there was a man holding the position of Yi Yin and Huo Guang, and the second sentence was the true one.
He governed by liking and dislike, and the record's whole portrait of his rule is one exchange. An officer of the secretariat, Yin Xun, remonstrated with him. Zhang Guan said that a tiger cub eats meat on the third day and does not need to be taught.
In 359 he decided to end the arrangement. He levied tens of thousands of men at Guzang, meaning to kill Song Hun and his brother and take the seat. The plan was known before it was carried out, which is what happens when a man raises an army in his own capital. Song Hun took forty-odd riders into the southern city and rode through the camps shouting that Zhang Guan had rebelled and that the dowager had ordered him killed. By the end of the ride he had two thousand men. The formula was the one that had installed the boy four years earlier: speak for the old woman, and the gates open.
Zhang Guan came out and was beaten. One of his men, Xuan Lu, got close enough to stab Song Hun and failed to pierce the armour; Song Hun took him alive and asked whether he was frightened now. Xuan Lu said that his only regret was not stabbing deeper, and that he was not afraid. Song Hun thought this admirable and kept him close. Zhang Guan and his brother killed themselves, and the clan was killed with them.
Then Song Hun did the thing that showed what the office was for. He asked the boy to stop being king of Liang and go back to being governor of Liangzhou. A king is a rival; a governor is an officer. The government that had just destroyed a usurper needed to be an officer of Jin again, and the title came down as the regent changed. The boy lost a crown in the transaction and was not consulted about it.

3. The Brothers

Song Hun held the office for two years, and the record gives him almost nothing: no building, no appointment, no campaign. Its one long scene is his deathbed, and the scene earns its length, because it is the only place in the eight years where anyone says out loud who should hold power and why.
In the fourth month of 361 he was dying. Xuanjing went to see him, with Lady Ma. The record gives the words to the pair, and they may as well be the grandmother's: if the general did not recover, the widow and the orphan would have nobody, and she wished to give the office to his son Linzong. Song Hun answered that his son was young and weak; that his brother Cheng was the better administrator, though soft and slow, and might fail when things happened quickly; that with encouragement he could do. He warned his family not to use the office to be arrogant, and the officials to be loyal. When he died, the record says, people wept in the streets.
This is a regency being treated as an inheritance. The dying man names his successor, the ruler agrees, and the officials are asked to be faithful to a family rather than to an office. Nobody proposes that the boy rule.
Xuanjing made Song Cheng general of the palace army. Five months later Zhang Yong, the right marshal, attacked him, killed him, and destroyed the Song clan. The family that had run the province for two years was removed in an afternoon by an officer of its own government.
That is the second kind of succession. The office had no rule for what happened when its holder died, so it had two: a dying man's recommendation, which worked once, and murder, which worked every other time.
The coups were also getting closer. In 355 the army came from Fuhan, a week's march away. In 359 it came from the southern city. In 361 it came from the next office in the same building.

4. The Roof

Zhang Yong was made general of the guard and Zhang Tianxi, the boy's uncle, general of the palace army. The two commands were the two halves of the palace, and the arrangement was an invitation.
Zhang Yong behaved like a man who meant to keep the office. He was proud, he was harsh, he executed a great many people, he built a party, and the record adds that he had access to Lady Ma. The last is a charge rather than a fact, and the charge is the interesting part: in this court, access to the dowager was the same thing as a claim on the household.
Zhang Tianxi's confidant was a man from Dunhuang named Liu Su, not yet twenty. Liu Su told him that the affairs of the state were not yet quiet. Tianxi asked what he meant. Liu Su said that the way the general of the guard came and went was like Changning. Changning was the title Zhang Zuo had carried before he took the throne. Tianxi said that he had suspected it and had not dared to say it.
They took four hundred men and went to court with Zhang Yong. Liu Su and Zhao Baiju carried their knives with the blades out of the sheath. At the gate Liu Su struck and missed; Zhao Baiju struck and missed; the three of them got inside. Zhang Yong ran, collected three hundred armoured men, and attacked the palace gate.
Zhang Tianxi climbed onto the roof and shouted down at them. Zhang Yong was a rebel; what crime had the Songs committed that their whole clan should be destroyed; this was a matter of his family's gate; how could soldiers turn their weapons on him; what he wanted was Zhang Yong's person and nothing else. The soldiers dispersed. Zhang Yong cut his own throat.
The speech is the clearest statement of the constitution that survives from the reign, and it is the most dangerous sentence in the chapter. The state is a family's gate; soldiers owe obedience to a household, not to a government. Once a member of the family has said that aloud, another member can say it, and the next one to say it will be standing where Tianxi stood.
Zhang Tianxi was made commissioner with plenary powers, general of the champion, and commander-in-chief of the armies of the centre and the provinces. In the twelfth month the era changed. Jianxing forty-nine became Shengping five: the same year, with a different number in front of it, because Shengping was the era of the emperor in Jiankang and Jianxing had belonged to an emperor who had been a prisoner since 316 and dead since 318. The change cost the province a fiction it had kept since the fall of Chang'an, and it bought a patent. The Jin court named the boy commander-in-chief of the Longyou armies, governor of Liangzhou, colonel protecting the Qiang, and duke of Xiping.
A date was the only currency the regents had that was not land. It cost them nothing to spend, and it was the one thing Jiankang wanted.

5. The Intercalary Month

For two years after that the record is almost empty. A regent without a rival produces no entries: no war, no faction, no execution, no accession. The emptiness is the most informative passage in the chapter. It says that the government had become single again.
In the eighth month of 363 Lady Ma died. She had been in the hall when Zhao Chang brought the boy out; her order had been the licence Song Hun carried through the camps; her name had been the charge against Zhang Yong; she was the one person in Guzang whose claim on the household was older than Zhang Tianxi's. The record gives her death one line.
Xuanjing made Lady Guo dowager. The chapter calls her his father's concubine and another account calls her his mother; the uncertainty is of a piece with the rest of his parentage, which the record never states plainly.
Lady Guo then did what her position allowed: she conspired with a minister, Zhang Qin, to kill him. The conspiracy leaked. Zhang Qin and the others were executed.
Xuanjing was frightened, and offered the throne to his uncle. Tianxi refused. A refusal is not a protection; it is a delay that costs the refuser nothing.
Liu Su, now general of the right, and others urged Tianxi to take the title for himself. In the intercalary eighth month Tianxi led troops through the palace gate, or sent Liu Su in his place — the two accounts differ by a subject — and had the boy killed quietly. The announcement said that he had died of a sudden illness.
He was fourteen. The chapter says nine years in charge; the years from 355 to 363 are eight. It adds that the family named him Duke Chong and that the Jin emperor Xiaowu later gave him the name Jingdao; the princely form of Chong is the one the later handbooks use, and the one at the head of this article. Tianxi took the titles, and the record adds, in the same sentence, that he was eighteen.
The killer was eighteen. The boy was fourteen. The difference between them was four years and an army.

6. What the Record Kept

The Jinshu files him with the provincial biographies and not with the northern courts, and the filing is the first fact about him: the men who kept the file thought of his house as a frontier government that had stayed loyal, which is why they preserved its crimes and not its paperwork.
The chapter gives eight years in a few hundred characters, and almost all of it is a sequence of killings. It is worth asking why, because the answer is not that nothing else happened.
A minor's reign has no acts of its own. Every order issued in Guzang between 355 and 363 was issued by a man who was not the ruler, and each of those men was destroyed together with his papers. What an annalist could date was not policy but the fall of a minister, because a fall is a public event with a day attached to it. The boy's own voice appears once, at a sickbed, and the sentence may as easily be his grandmother's. The one initiative the chapter gives him is an offer to give up.
And the last word on him was left to the household that killed him. The formula "announced a sudden death" is the official story, preserved beside the truth it was written to cover. A government that cannot report its ruler's death cannot have a public account of his life.
None of this is evidence that Xuanjing was a bad ruler. It is evidence that he was never a ruler. The illness of Former Liang in these years was not cruelty or incompetence at the top; it was the structural fact the whole chapter describes, a young ruler and strong kinsmen. A boy on the seat does not make a state weak. It makes every man near the seat a candidate, and it makes the regency an office with no exit: a regent who wins becomes a usurper and has to kill the boy, and a regent who loses is killed. There is no third career.
The disease had three stages in a single generation. In 346 Chonghua inherited at sixteen and was old enough to be lucky; he died at twenty-seven and left a boy of ten. In 353 Yaoling lasted a month. In 355 Xuanjing lasted eight years, not because he was stronger but because he was more useful. The province had learned to run without a ruler and had not learned how to stop.
The numbers do not agree. Seven at accession, fourteen at death: eight years apart, which should make fifteen. The chapter also gives him nine years in office, which is what counting the calendar years he touched produces. The birth year at the top of this article follows the death age, which is the chapter's own figure; the accession age is the Zizhi Tongjian's, and the two are a year apart. The men who kept this record were careful about the deaths of generals and careless about the life of a child, and the carelessness is the most direct evidence there is of what he was to them.
For six of his eight years the documents of his government were dated by an emperor who had been dead for four decades. For the last two they were dated by a living one. The only thing that changed at the top of the page was the number, and the number was never his. He was seven when they brought him out of the inner hall and fourteen when they came through the gate at night, and in between the record does not give him one sentence that is certainly his own.