Duke Zhao of Former Liang

In the fifth month of 314 the inspector of Liang province died at Guzang, and the province's officers and leading families pushed his eldest son into the seat. Zhang Shi had spent most of his adult life as an official of the capital rather than of the frontier, and had come west only when his father was struck by an illness that left him unable to speak. He knew the court from the inside and the province from a rebellion he had helped put down. What he inherited was a walled city on a single road, a school with five hundred students, an ordinance fixing the price of coin against cloth, an army of provincial levies, and a calendar.
The calendar is the part that mattered. Two years later the dynasty that issued it lost its capital; four years later its emperor was dead; and the officer holding the corridor had to decide what year it was. His answer, to go on using the year he had inherited, is the whole of his statecraft. He won no great battle, built nothing that survives, and was killed in his own house by men he had taken into his service; yet the thing he refused to do is why the province could still be called a province of Jin when almost every other province of the north had stopped being one. This is a life that has to be read from its omissions.

1. The eldest son

His birth year is not recorded, and the one figure that survives, an age at death in an encyclopaedia fragment, is too thin to build on. He was a grown man with twenty years of office behind him, a provincial recommendation that had taken him to a ministry in the capital, and a reputation for clear administration and for liking scholars.
Early in the Yongjia period he was offered the post of general of agile cavalry, a capital command in a court that was coming apart, and asked instead to be sent back to his father in the west. At Guzang he was put to work against Cao Qu, the administrator of Xiping who had joined the revolt against his father, and the campaign made his name in the province: marquis of a village, then general of the western household, then marquis of a county. By 313 he held the western household command with the colonelcy protecting the Qiang, the second military office of the province and the one that dealt with the tribes.
That career explains how easily the succession went. When Zhang Gui died the province pushed the son into his father's place without a contest, and the court at Chang'an, which had nothing to send and much to ask, confirmed him within months. The patent is worth reading for its grammar: it praises the dead father, grants the son his father's offices one by one, and tells him to screen the royal house. Nothing in it makes him a sovereign. It makes him an heir in office, which is a different thing, and it was the only kind of inheritance the court had left to give.
The first test of what he thought he had inherited was a small object. The head of Lanchi county sent up a soldier named Zhang Bing who had found a seal inscribed Seal of the Emperor. The officers congratulated their new ruler and began to talk about his virtue. Zhang Shi refused the conversation: he said he had always resented Zhao Shao for toying with a seal, asked why they should suddenly speak in that way, and sent the seal to the capital. The gesture reads as modesty. It is better read as administration. A man who keeps a seal that says emperor has either committed treason or founded a dynasty.
The seal went east. The calendar stayed.

2. The sixth year of Jianxing

In 316, with the Han Zhao general Liu Yao closing on Chang'an, Zhang Shi sent the commander Wang Gai east with five thousand horse and foot and with the tribute lists and registers of the commanderies. The same convoy carried famous horses, local products, and classical and historical books. The number is the annalist's and should be treated as one; the books are the detail worth noticing. A provincial government was sending its paperwork and its library to a capital about to be taken.
The capital surrendered in the eleventh month. Before it did, the emperor's messengers got out with an edict promoting Zhang Shi to grand commander, shepherd of Liang province, attendant, and minister of works, with authority to act in the emperor's place. He declined, on the ground that the emperor was in enemy hands. The refusal has usually been read as loyalty, and it was that; it can also be read as a legal precaution, since an office granted by an emperor on the point of capture is an office of doubtful title. He kept the offices he already had, and he kept the year.
The court re-formed at Jiankang. In 317 it proclaimed the era Jianwu; in 318, when the emperor took the full title, it proclaimed Taixing. Guzang ignored both. The annalist's sentence is flat: he did not use the Jiangdong era names, and still called the year Jianxing. The dynastic history is more exact: in the year the emperor ascended and changed the era to Taixing, Zhang Shi still wrote the sixth year of Jianxing and did not follow the restoration's change of era. In the same spring he had sent the officer Cai Zhong to Jiankang with a memorial urging the emperor to take the throne.
Those two facts belong in one sentence, because together they define him. He acknowledged the man and refused the year.
A reign title was not a decoration on a coin. It was the field in which every date was written: the heading of a tax roll, the date of a commission, the line at the foot of a contract, the inscription on a tomb. To change it was to declare that a new authority had begun; to keep it was to declare that the old one had not ended. The province's administrative life was therefore dated from an emperor who had surrendered and, by 318, was dead. Every clerk who wrote the year into a register was making a statement that nobody in Guzang had ordered and nobody stopped.
Two calendars were available to him in 318, and he took neither. He could have proclaimed an era of his own, the act that turns a governorship into a reign; his family would do it once, a generation later, and the man who did it is remembered for the attempt rather than for the years. He could have adopted Taixing, which would have been correct, unremarkable, and would have dated his authority from a court that had never given him an order. He kept a date no other government was using. That is not the behaviour of a rebel, and not quite the behaviour of a loyal official. It is the behaviour of a man who has decided that the form is the substance.
The word for this is not nostalgia. Nostalgia is private and costs nothing; this was public and cost something. A legitimist of the old line would have refused the new emperor, and Zhang Shi had urged him to ascend; a rebel would have made his own era, and Zhang Shi made none. What he was loyal to was an arrangement rather than a person: a province, its offices, its registers, and the dynasty in whose name those offices were held.
The house is counted first among the five Liangs, and the word in that name was never coined at Guzang: it was the province's word, written on the same seals and copied by the same clerks from one inspector to the next. The year outlived him by a long way. Guzang counted Jianxing to its forty-first year, which was 353, with one interruption when Zhang Zuo took the imperial title and proclaimed an era of his own for two years; the old count was restored in 355 and ran to the end of 361. Documents recovered from the refuse of frontier garrisons in Xinjiang carry Jianxing years in the 340s, decades after the era had ceased anywhere else. A calendar that is kept leaves dated rubbish behind, and the rubbish is evidence.

3. What was sent east

The relief of Chang'an failed, and the attempt did not stop with the failure. In 317 Zhang Shi sent Han Pu, Tian Qi, Zhang Lang and Yin Yu east with ten thousand horse and foot. They could not get through and turned back; at Nan'an the local Qiang blocked the road, and after a standoff of a hundred days, with food and arrows gone, Han Pu killed the ox of his own carriage to feed the men and broke out in a charge. The annalist gives him a speech first, asking whether the men remembered their parents and their children and whether they wished to live, and gives them their answers. It is the kind of scene a compiler constructs when he has no dispatch to quote.
The diplomacy of those years is more revealing. After Chang'an fell, the prince of Nanyang, Sima Bao, held Shanggui and considered himself the last centre of the dynasty; in 319 he took the title King of Jin and changed the era, and confirmed Zhang Shi in a grand generalship. Zhang Shi sent him troops when Sima Bao's officer Chen An turned against him. Then in 320, with Liu Yao pressing, Sima Bao decided to move into Liangzhou, and Zhang Shi sent a general with soldiers to meet him, publicly to escort him and in fact to keep him out. Sima Bao was killed by his own officer Zhang Chun soon after, and more than ten thousand of his people came into the corridor anyway.
The logic is the logic of the whole reign. An army could go east; a prince could not come west. A prince inside Guzang would be a second court in a province whose value consisted in having only one, and a Jin prince with a better genealogy than his host would have made the inspector's commission look like what it was, a delegation that could be revoked.
The annalist adds that he then trusted the province's distance, grew proud, and let his government slacken. It is the only criticism of him the sources preserve, and it comes without a single example. What can be said is that the frontier stayed quiet while he lived. Liu Yao, who had taken the western capital, did not come up the corridor in his reign; the invasion came in 323, three years after his death.

4. The outer chamber

In the summer of 320 a man named Liu Hong was living on Tianti mountain in the hills outside Guzang. He was from Jingzhao, in the old western capital region, and practised a heterodox art: he lit lamps and hung mirrors in a cave so that the rock seemed to give out light, and the performance drew more than a thousand people, including men of the inspector's own household. He told two of them, Yan She the retainer and Zhao Ang the gate commander, both from his own home commandery, that Heaven had given him a divine seal and that he was to be king of Liangzhou. The record has him say it, and has them believe it. They bound more than ten of Zhang Shi's attendants into a plot to kill the inspector and put Liu Hong in his place.
Zhang Shi learned of it. His brother brought him word and urged him to strike, and he ordered the gate commander Shi Chu to arrest Liu Hong. The arrest was not quick enough. Yan She and the others came in with knives under their clothes and killed Zhang Shi in the outer chamber of his own residence.
Liu Hong was taken. Seeing Shi Chu arrive, the record has him say: the inspector is already dead, what is the use of killing me. Shi Chu cut out his tongue, jailed him, and had him torn apart in the Guzang marketplace; the associates were killed by his brother Zhang Mao, whose first act as ruler the purge was. The two accounts disagree on the order of the day, the dynastic history putting Liu Hong's death before the murder and the later annalistic history putting it after, and the difference cannot now be settled. Both agree on the shape of it: a ruler who had refused a seal found in a soldier's hand was killed because another man said heaven had given him one.
Three seals in six years. One was found in a barrack and sent east. One was claimed in a cave and paid for with several hundred lives. The third was the seal of a provincial duke, which he had never asked to have enlarged.
His son Zhang Jun was still a child. The officers therefore made his brother Zhang Mao inspector and Duke of Xiping, and gave the boy the rank of general calming the army.

5. The smallness of the record

What exists of him is an appendix to his father's life in Jin shu 86, thin enough to read in a sitting, put together under the Tang from a family record that had passed through the wars and retold three centuries later, in better order and no more detail, by Zizhi tongjian, which is a second telling rather than a second witness.
The thinness has causes, and they are the causes that make this kind of rule invisible. He reigned six years. He fought no war of conquest and annexed nothing. He built no city and proclaimed no institution; the school and the coinage the province was known for were his father's, and he kept them running, which leaves no date to cite. His biography is attached to another man's because the history of the house was organised around its founder, and an appendix records what was remarkable, not what was routine. The one episode told at length is the murder, because a ruler killed by the clients of a wonder-worker is a moral exemplum, and compilers preserve what instructs.
He was given two names at death. His own officers called him Duke Zhao, a private judgement; the court at Jiankang, whose calendar he had refused for the last three years of his life, called him Duke Zhao, and that is the name that stuck. The arrangement he had defended outlived him and named him, which is a more literal inheritance than most founders leave their sons.
It is a commonplace that the age rewarded men who seized. It did, and they have biographies of forty pages. But between the seizures there were provinces that continued, and continuing produces no events: the register copied, the tax collected, the year written at the top of the page, the border held by nobody's famous victory. Zhang Shi did that for six years, and the result was that in a decade when the north changed hands repeatedly the corridor did not. The state that later ages counted first among the five Liangs existed in his reign as a set of offices that still worked, in a province that still used its province's name, dated by a year no one else was using.
He died in the eighth year of an era that had ceased to be proclaimed at Jiankang three years before. His successors went on writing it for another forty-one. The man is a paragraph in another man's life; the year is the line at the head of every document they left.