Emperor Huai of Jin

Of the Western Jin's four emperors, the third is the one whose reign is easiest to mistake for a footnote. He was born in 284, the twenty-fifth son of Emperor Wu. He came to the throne in 307, at twenty-three, because a regent needed a man who would not refuse him. Four years later the capital fell and he was taken; two years after that he was killed in the enemy's capital, in his thirtieth year. His annals are short, and he is remembered, when he is remembered at all, as the emperor under whose era name the north was lost.
The argument of this account is that those four years were not a single collapse but a series of attempts. A governor was sent against the rebellion in the east and broke it, and the rebellion's survivors went north and became an army. A soldier was sent to hold a city behind the enemy's lines and held it, with a Xianbei army he did not command. A minister was sent to the provinces to secure the dynasty's families and secured his own. The emperor called for troops, tried to move the capital, wrote to the one general who might still obey him, and each of these things worked in the narrow sense and failed in the large one. What follows is the history of a government that kept finding an instrument and discovering that the instrument had already been spent.

1. The Twenty-Fifth Son

Sima Chi was born in 284, in the fifth year of Taikang, to a woman of the Wang family named Yuanji, whose rank in the inner palace was zhongcairen, a middle rank that made her son nothing in particular. He was the twenty-fifth of the emperor's sons, and in a household of that size a twenty-fifth son is a name in a register.
The annals preserve two omens from his birth, because of what happened later. A propitious grain, a jiahe, was said to have grown at Nanchang in Yuzhang, and a man who read the air had said that there was the vapour of a Son of Heaven over that commandery. In 290, when he was six, his father enfeoffed him as prince of Yuzhang. In the fourth month of the same year the emperor died, and his eldest surviving son, Sima Zhong, took the throne. He was a prince of a rich southern commandery, and then the court he had been born into began to come apart.
From 291 to 306 the princes of the house fought one another. The details of that war belong to the reign it destroyed, and they are not this story. What matters here is what the youngest generation did while it was going on. Sima Chi closed his gate. The formula the annals use is exact and slightly cold: he kept to himself, cut off visits and excursions, took no part in the affairs of the world, and gave himself to the histories, and because of this he had a good name at the time. In a court where a reputation for ability was a reason to be killed, a reputation for reading was a form of safety. He had calculated, correctly, that the only ambition worth having in those years was to be overlooked.
He held the usual offices of a prince: a cavalier attendantship in the palace. In 301, when the prince of Zhao took the throne and put the emperor under house arrest, the prince of Yuzhang was arrested with other members of the house; when the usurpation collapsed he was released and made a colonel of the archers. He rose to grand general of the chariots and cavalry and commander of the military affairs in Qing province, a command he never went to. In 304 he was made grand general of the north and commander of the garrison of Ye. They were titles attached to a man who stayed in the capital and read.
In the twelfth month of 304 the government gave him the one office that could not be refused. The imperial heir had just been deposed. Sima Ying in the north and Sima Yong in the west were dividing the state between them, and the court needed an heir who belonged to neither party. Sima Chi had no party, no soldiers, and no history of intrigue. He was the safest man in the imperial house because he had no friends, and before the year ended he was made imperial younger brother and heir.
He declined. The annals say he declined because Sima Tan, the prince of Qinghe, had already been crown prince, and he was afraid to take what had been another man's. The refusal is more interesting than a formality. The officer of the prince's secretariat, Xiu Su of Luling, argued with him at length: the two ministers were managing the house for the sake of the altars of the state; the weight of the succession should go to the man the age looked to; Tan was young and did not hold the hearts of the court. The argument was blunt and political, and it ended with the sentence that he should take the office before the Di and Qiang watered their horses in the Jing and the Ba. Sima Chi answered with a phrase that tells us nearly everything we know about his education: You are my Song Chang.
Song Chang was the man who in 180 BC had persuaded the prince of Dai to accept the Han throne when the court needed a Liu. The prince hesitated, tested the ground, came, and became Emperor Wen, one of the best rulers of his dynasty. It was the highest comparison a prince of that age could make, and it was also a warning: the prince of Dai had been summoned because the court had already been purged.

2. The Empty Court

The emperor died in the eleventh month of 306 by the Chinese count, which is January 307, and three days later the prince of Yuzhang was on the throne. The contest over those days was not about his merits. The empress Yang Xianrong calculated that she could not be empress dowager to her husband's brother, since the relationship was that of sister-in-law and brother-in-law, and she sent for the prince of Qinghe, Sima Tan, the boy who had once been crown prince. Tan had already reached the pavilion of the secretariat when the palace attendant Hua Hun and others urgently summoned the imperial brother instead. Sima Chi took the throne in a palace that had no guard worth the name.
He did what a new emperor did. He proclaimed an amnesty, honoured the former empress as empress of Hui and lodged her in the Hongxun palace, had his own dead mother honoured as empress dowager, and made his wife, Lady Liang, empress. In the first month of 307 he changed the era to Yongjia, abolished the punishment of the three clans, and confirmed the prince of Donghai, Sima Yue, as grand tutor with the government in his hands.
At the audience that followed he did something the court had not seen for years. He sat in the Taiji hall, had the reading of the monthly ordinances performed as the old rule required, and heard government in the eastern hall. At the banquets he talked with the officials about public business and questioned them on the classics. The yellow gate attendant Fu Xuan said, loudly enough to be recorded, that the age of Emperor Wu had come again. A courtier's exaggeration, but not baseless: the new emperor knew the forms, liked them, and performed them with a pleasure the previous reign had never shown.
The forms were all he had. Sima Yue had won the war of 306 and brought the emperor back to Luoyang, and had learned in it that the man on the throne was more useful alive than replaced. He took the title of grand tutor and the record of the secretariat, and in the third month of 307 he left the capital for Xuchang and took the government with him.
The instrument was the mobile administration, the xingtai, which allowed a commander to seal appointments and issue orders in the field. A court in Luoyang could still issue an edict; a court at Xuchang could issue a commission, and a commission was what men wanted. The officials learned to travel. The emperor stayed. What remained in Luoyang was the ancestral temple, the sacrifices, the palace, and a young man who knew what a capital without a government meant.
Wang Yan was made minister over the masses. He is the second figure of these years because he was the most articulate defender of the view that the state was a place to be survived. He was the most admired man of his generation and the leader of what the age called pure talk. In 307 he told Sima Yue that the central plain was lost and that the dynasty must rely on the provinces, and that the provinces must be given to men who combined civil and military talent. He then proposed his own brother Wang Cheng for Jing province and his cousin Wang Dun for Qing.
His explanation to the two men is one of the most quoted passages of the period. Jing province had the strength of the Yangzi and the Han; Qing province had the sea at its back; with the two of them outside and himself in the court, the family would have three burrows, like the cunning rabbit of the old story. The histories add that men of judgement despised him for it. They despised him because it was the calculation of a family offered as the policy of a state, at the moment when the state needed a policy.
The three burrows did not hold. Wang Dun was recalled to the capital within two years and given the palace secretariat, and the province of Qing passed to Gou Xi, a soldier. Wang Cheng went to Jing, drank, and left the government of the province to a deputy; in 310 the refugee revolt of Wang Ru broke his army without a battle, and by 312 he was dead, killed by Wang Dun. Of the three, the one that lasted was the one nobody had counted: Wang Dao, another cousin of the same clan, who had gone south with the prince of Langya.
In the twelfth month of 307 Sima Yue made himself chancellor and claimed the governorship of Yan province and the command of six provinces' military affairs. He had the prince of Qinghe, Sima Tan, imprisoned in Jinyong city on a forged edict, and killed him in the second month of 308; Tan had been crown prince before the emperor, and his existence was an argument. In 308 he moved from Xuchang to Juancheng and Puyang, and in the third month of 309 he returned to Luoyang. Then he brought troops into the palace.
What happened then is the centre of the reign. He arrested the men closest to the emperor: the director of the secretariat, Miao Bo; the emperor's maternal uncle; and more than ten others, all killed. The emperor was in the room. He did not stop it, and the annals do not pretend that he could have. After that day the men who attended him were men the grand tutor had chosen.
The same spring the rivers dried. The Yangzi, the Han, the Yellow River and the Luo all fell so low that they could be crossed on foot, and the annals record it as a portent, in the same month as the killings. The water that carried the grain and the armies was gone.

3. The Men Sent Out

Between 307 and 310 four men held four parts of the empire against four fires, and each of them became stronger than the court that relied on him. The government kept acting, and its actions kept creating the things that would replace it.
The first fire was in the east. In the fifth month of 307 a horse-pasture boss named Ji Sang raised a revolt in the name of the murdered prince of Chengdu, defeated the governor of Wei commandery, and took Ye. He killed the new prince of Xin Cai, Sima Teng, who had been sent to hold the north, and burned the palace at Ye; the fire, the annals say, burned for ten days. Ye was the old capital of Cao Cao and the greatest arsenal and storehouse in the north. Its loss in a single month told every soldier in the plain that the dynasty could not protect its own depots.
Gou Xi was sent against him. Gou Xi was a frontier officer of severe discipline and a temper that ran to killing; he governed by daily executions, and the province he later held called him the butcher governor. He met Ji Sang at Dongwuyang in the eighth month and broke him, then broke him again in the ninth and took nine of his fortified camps. By the twelfth month Ji Sang had been killed at Leling by the leaders of a qihuo band, a self-defence militia of displaced people, and the east was quiet.
It was a real victory and it produced the next enemy. Ji Sang's commander of horse was a man named Shi Le, a Jie who had been taken in a raid and sold as a field slave in his teens, and who had learned the war of the plain better than the men who owned him. When Ji Sang fell, Shi Le did not surrender. He went north to Liu Yuan, who would proclaim himself emperor of Han at Pingyang the following year, and was given a title and a command. The rebellion in the east had been destroyed; its army had changed sides.
The second fire was in the north. Liu Kun had been appointed governor of Bing province in 306 and reached Jinyang, the provincial seat, in the spring of 307. The city he entered was empty, the granaries were bare, and he had a little more than a thousand men. He set about the work that made his name: he rebuilt the walls, opened the fields, brought back the refugees, and within a year the city was alive again. Jinyang sat on the Han state's northern flank, and until 312 it was the one Jin garrison the enemy could not ignore.
He could not hold it alone. To his north was the Xianbei state of Dai, under Tuoba Yilu, and Liu Kun made himself the man's sworn brother and used his cavalry. In 310 he had the court make Tuoba Yilu grand chanyu, and later had him titled duke of Dai. Both honours carried a claim on Dai commandery, which belonged to You province, and Wang Jun took them as an insult. The alliance that saved the north also opened a quarrel between the two men who were supposed to be holding it.
The third fire was in the north-east, and it was not a fire Wang Jun intended to put out. Wang Jun had held You province since the previous reign, with his own troops, his own appointments, and an arrangement with the Duan clan of the Xianbei that gave him the best cavalry in the region. In 308 he broke Shi Le at Changshan with Xianbei horse; in 310 he sent a Xianbei column to save the road south of Luoyang. He never took a title that belonged to the emperor, and he was independent in every other sense. In 311, when the capital fell, he set up a crown prince and a court of his own in the north-east, as if the dynasty could be continued by a provincial governor with a good army.
The fourth fire was in the centre, and it was never put out at all. Wang Mi was a man of a great family in Donglai who raised troops in the second month of 307 and raided Qing, Xu, Yan and Yu for four years. In 308 he entered Xuchang and then attacked Luoyang itself; Wang Yan took the field and drove him off. He came back, took a title from Liu Yuan, and became the Han state's eastern arm; in 311 he entered the capital from the south while Liu Yao entered it from the west.
The court could appoint a governor. It could not appoint the province's revenue to itself, and it could not make the governors fight in one plan. Each of them was loyal to the idea of the dynasty and to his own command, in that order; in the four years before Luoyang fell the order was the whole of politics.

4. The Last Levy

In the sixth month of 310 Liu Yuan died at Pingyang. His son Liu He took the throne, and soon after Liu He's brother Liu Cong killed him and took it in his place. The Han state had a new emperor and a court full of Jin defectors, and in the seventh month Liu Yao and Shi Le were besieging Huai, north of the Yellow River. In the ninth month the refugees of Yong and Qin rose at Wan under Wang Ru and destroyed the relieving armies of Shan Jian and Wang Cheng, and the road from the south to Luoyang was cut by men who had been Jin subjects the year before.
The summer had brought a plague of locusts across six provinces. The annals say the insects ate the grass and the trees and the hair off the cattle and horses. The capital was short of grain. In the tenth month the emperor did the one thing left to a government whose provinces had stopped answering: he sent out a general call for troops, and he gave the messengers a sentence to carry.
Tell the commands for me, he said. If it is done today, there is still time to save it; after today there will be no reaching it.
No one came. The annals say it in four characters, and the four characters are the end of the reign's hope: mo you zhi zhe, there was no one who arrived. It was not that the provinces had decided to let the dynasty die. Liu Kun was fighting for his own city in the north, Wang Jun was building his own court in the north-east, Zhang Gui in Liang province was loyal and far away, and the prince of Langya in the south had a province that had been at peace for three years and an army that was not yet his to spend. Each of them had a reason. The reasons added up to an empty road.
In the eleventh month Sima Yue left, saying that he would attack Shi Le. He took forty thousand soldiers, the mobile administration, and the greater part of the officials who still had households in the capital, and he marched to Xuchang and then to Xiang, where he took the governorship of Yu province and made Wang Yan his army director. The annals describe what he left behind in a passage that reads like a report from a besieged city: the palace and the ministries had no guards, the famine grew worse every day, the dead lay across the halls of the palace, the offices dug trenches around their own compounds and defended them, and robbers worked the streets in daylight.
The emperor was in that palace. He had an empress, a crown prince, a body of attendants, and the titles of a state that had ceased to exist around him. In the first month of 311 he sent a secret edict to Gou Xi ordering him to attack Sima Yue. It was the first act of the reign that was his own, and it was aimed at the man who had killed his uncle in front of him and had taken the army out of the capital.
The edict worked. In the third month the court published Yue's crimes and called on the provinces to punish him; Gou Xi was made grand general; and Yue, who had spent four years building a state around his own person, died at Xiangcheng of an illness brought on, the histories say, by grief and anger. The army concealed the death. Wang Yan was pressed to take command of it, and refused in words that are worth keeping: I never had any wish for office; I rose by the routine of promotion and came to this; how can a business like this be put into the hands of a man without ability? He was telling the truth. He was also the man who had dug three burrows and called it a policy.
So the army began to move east, escorting the coffin of the grand tutor to his fief in Donghai, with Wang Yan and the princes of the house in the column and no one in command. The emperor had destroyed the regent. He had also inherited the regent's army, except that the army was commanded by the regent's men, and its purpose was a funeral.

5. Ningping

The column was not an army. It was the court, the households of the princes, the staffs of the ministries, the servants, the baggage, and forty thousand soldiers somewhere inside it, moving slowly eastward behind a coffin. The annals put the dead at more than a hundred thousand, from the princes downward, a figure plausible only because the column was a society on the road rather than a fighting force. It had no screen, no scouts worth the name, and no agreed commander.
Shi Le was at Xuchang. When he learned that the grand tutor was dead and that the column was moving, he took light cavalry and went after it. He caught it in the fourth month at Ningping, in Ku county, on open ground where cavalry could work. His men rode round the column and shot into it. The Jin troops, packed together with their families and their carts, could not form; men fell and were trampled; the line broke backward into the baggage and the baggage into the refugee train. The annals say the dead were trampled into a heap like a mountain and that no one escaped, which is the language of total defeat.
The princes were taken. Wang Yan was taken, and the prince of Xiangyang, Sima Fan, and the prince of Wuling, Sima Dan, and the personnel minister, Liu Wang, and the chief justice, Zhuge Quan. In a second action at Weicang, the heir of the grand tutor and forty-eight princes of the imperial house were taken with their households; the grand tutor's consort was sold.
Shi Le had Wang Yan brought before him, called him by his title, and asked about the fall of Jin. Wang Yan explained the causes of the disaster and said the responsibility was not his. Shi Le was pleased and talked with him until the sun had moved across the sky. Then Wang Yan said that he had never taken part in public affairs and asked to be spared, and advised Shi Le to take the imperial title. Shi Le lost his temper. You are famous across the four seas, he said, you held the highest offices, you entered the court as a young man and stayed until your hair was white; how can you say you had no part in the world's affairs? The one who ruined the world was you.
He did not have him executed with a blade. He had his men pull down a wall on him in the night, which was a way of killing a man of his rank without shedding his blood. Wang Yan's last words, as the histories preserve them, were not about the dynasty. We are not the equals of the ancients, he said; but if we had not made a fashion of emptiness and had put our strength into holding the world together, we would not have come to this.
Shi Le opened the coffin and burned the body. This man, he said, ruined the world; I burn him on the world's behalf and tell heaven and earth. It was a political act dressed as a judgement, and it worked: the man who had governed for four years was destroyed twice, in his army and in his corpse.
By the end of that month the Western Jin had no field army. It had a capital, a palace, a crown prince, and whatever troops the city could raise from its own households. Between Shi Le at Ku county and the walls of Luoyang there was nothing. The three burrows of the Wang family had all been stopped: one brother had lost his province to a refugee revolt, the other had been recalled to the capital and posted south, and the man who had dug them was under a wall.

6. The Fall of Luoyang

The city had been starving since the winter. The annals give the price of grain at more than ten thousand cash a bushel and use the three characters that Chinese historians use for the last stage of a siege, ren xiang shi, people eating one another. Eight or nine in ten of the officials had gone.
Gou Xi sent a plan from the east. He proposed to move the court to Cangyuan, where he had a base, and he offered a flotilla of a few dozen boats, five hundred guards, and a thousand measures of grain to bring the emperor down the river. The emperor agreed. The ministers refused. They were afraid of Pan Tao, Yue's man who held the capital, and the palace households did not want to leave their property. The plan died in the council chamber while the boats waited.
In the fifth month the emperor called the ministers together and announced that he would go. There was no guard for the road. He clapped his hands and said: How is it that there is not even a carriage? The minister Fu Zhi was sent to Heyin to fit out boats. The emperor walked out of the western side gate with a few dozen officials, reached Tongtuo street, and was robbed by bandits. He could not go forward, and went back into the palace.
The end came in the sixth month. Liu Cong sent his general Huyan Yan with twenty-seven thousand men, and the histories give him twelve victories on the road and more than thirty thousand dead before he reached the city. He burned the boats the emperor had kept on the Luo. Then Liu Yao came from the west and Wang Mi from the south, and the three columns entered the city together.
The emperor opened the gate of the Hualin garden and went out toward the lotus pond at Heyin, meaning to reach Chang'an. He was overtaken in the gardens and taken. He was held at the Duan gate. The crown prince, Sima Quan, was killed, with the prince of Wu, the prince of Jingling, the two vice-directors of the department of state affairs, the governor of Henan, and a great number of officials. The annals count the officials and commoners killed at more than thirty thousand.
The tombs of the dynasty north of the city were opened. The palaces, the ancestral temple, and the offices were burned. The former empress, Yang Xianrong, was taken into Liu Yao's household. The imperial seals were sent north to Pingyang, among them the seal of transmission that later ages treated as the object that made an emperor lawful. Liu Yao wanted to move the Han capital to Luoyang, and Wang Mi urged him to do it; the two men quarrelled over the plunder and the plan, and Liu Yao burned the palaces and withdrew. In the tenth month Shi Le killed Wang Mi at a banquet, and the alliance that had taken the capital dissolved over its body.
The dynasty tried to continue in three places. Fu Zhi set up an administration at Heyin, north of Luoyang, and died there in 312. Xun Fan took the prince of Qin away to the south-east, and from there the boy was carried west. Gou Xi had the prince of Yuzhang, a son of the prince of Qinghe, made crown prince at Meng; the boy lasted seventy days. Three successors, three courts, and no capital; the one that lasted was the one that went west.
Luoyang had been the seat of a government since 220, and the seat of the whole empire since 265. In the sixth month of 311 it stopped being one. The fires took the palaces and the archives, and with them the registers on which a government depends. What survived of the Jin state survived as a court on the road.

7. Pingyang

The road north took him to the Fen valley, to the city Liu Yuan had made his capital. Liu Cong had come to the throne there a year earlier by killing his brother, and he had a court, an army, and men who knew exactly what the capture of an emperor was worth. The Han court changed its era to Jiaping. The prisoner was given a title before he was given a house.
The annals of his own reign say that Liu Cong made him Duke of Kuaiji. The record of Liu Cong's court says something more precise: that he was first given a special rank, the office of grand master of the left, and the title Duke of Ping'e, and was later promoted to Duke of Kuaiji with the honours of the three ministers and given a junior consort of the Liu clan. The two accounts need not conflict: the first is a Jin summary and gives the title he ended with; the second is the enemy court's record and gives the sequence. He was not treated as a common prisoner. He was kept as a title from a former dynasty, in a suitable house.
Liu Cong had met him before. When Sima Chi was prince of Yuzhang, Liu Cong and Wang Ji had visited him, and the two men had exchanged poems and talked about literature. The memory is preserved in the Han record, and it explains the tone of the years at Pingyang: Liu Cong summoned him, recalled the archery and the gifts of that earlier meeting, and asked why the emperor's own flesh and blood had destroyed one another so badly. The prisoner answered carefully. This was not the doing of men, he said; it was the will of heaven. The great Han was taking the mandate, and heaven had made the princes destroy one another to clear the way. And if the house of Sima had kept the work of Emperor Wu and lived in amity, Your Majesty would not have the world. It was a submission and a rebuke in the same breath. He had spent his youth reading the histories, and now he was asked to explain his own family's place in them.
The court gave him a household and a title, and the provinces gave him something else: a use. In the ninth month of 312 the officials around the prince of Qin set that boy up as crown prince at Chang'an, on a mandate that had not come from Pingyang. A living emperor in Pingyang was a rival centre of legitimacy; a dead one would be a memory, and a memory was the lesser danger. The Han court understood the arithmetic before the Jin courts did.
In the first month of 313 Liu Cong held a great assembly in the Guangji hall. The emperor of Jin was brought in wearing the blue cloth of a servant and given the wine to pour for the guests. The annals record the fact in one line and do not describe the room. The palace attendant Yu Min wept aloud. Liu Cong was disgusted.
That is the whole of the scene as the reign's own annals give it: a robe, a wine vessel, one man weeping, and the emperor's death later in the same month, on the day dingwei. The record of Liu Cong's court adds a second name and says that more than ten former Jin officials were killed with him, on a rumour that Yu Min and the others were in league with Liu Kun at Jinyang and would act as his inside men. Later accounts add poison, and the poison has become the popular version. The annals say only that he was killed; the enemy court says he was killed with a group of officials after a plot was reported.
Why that month? The tears alone would not have done it. A man who weeps for a captured emperor is a man who has not accepted the conquest, and a court that had set up a rival crown prince in Chang'an had reason to want the other emperor gone. The blue robe was a test. The weeping was the answer, and the answer was that the man in the robe still had subjects. He was killed not because he had been a bad emperor but because he had once been one.
He died in his thirtieth year. The annals close his chapter with the omens that opened it, and with a sentence about his years as heir: he was modest, drew the officials to him, and talked about books. Then they add the judgement of Xun Song, which is the best sentence anyone wrote about him. He had a clear and fine nature and showed ability early; in a peaceful age he would have made a good preserving ruler. What he inherited was the disorder of Hui, and the government of the prince of Donghai. He had none of the vices of the bad kings of antiquity, and he had the disaster of a wandering exile.

8. The South and the Verdict

In the seventh month of 307, four months after Sima Yue left for Xuchang, the court made the prince of Langya, Sima Rui, general who pacifies the east and commander of the military affairs of Yang province south of the Yangzi, with the staff of authority, and sent him to garrison Jianye. He was a distant member of the imperial house, without an army or a reputation, and the families of Wu did not come to him. Wang Dao, a younger cousin of Wang Yan's clan, sat with him, advised him to cultivate the men of the south, and built the staff that would make a provincial command into a government. Later ages would say that the Wang and the Ma shared the world. In 307 there was a prince, a strategist, and a city by the river.
The south was not yet a state. It was a command with a river behind it, a growing number of refugees, and an enemy that had not yet arrived. When Luoyang fell in 311, Xun Fan sent a circular to the provinces making the prince of Langya the leader of the loyalist cause, and the circular was issued while the emperor was still alive at Pingyang. That is the sentence that describes the transfer: the provinces were not waiting for a new dynasty. They were looking for a place where the old one could still be conducted, and the place they found was downstream.
Even there the war followed: in 312 Shi Le reached Ge Pi on the Huai before rain and sickness turned him back.
In 313, after the emperor's death, a man named Zu Ti crossed the river with a few hundred households of his own and a commission to raise troops in the north. His story belongs to the reign of the prince of Langya; what belongs here is the scale of the answer he got. The order that sent him out is the exact measure of the southern response in the year the emperor died: a title, a little grain, and permission.
The verdicts came at three distances. The first was spoken in 307 by Fu Xuan, who heard the new emperor hold court and said that the age of Wu had returned. The second was spoken by Xun Song, who had watched the whole reign and put the fault where it belonged: not in the man's nature, but in the inheritance and the regent. The third was written in the Tang, more than three centuries later, when a commission compiled the Jin shu for a dynasty that had reunified the country and needed an explanation of the earlier failure. Its summary is eight characters of Chinese: he inherited disorder and took the throne, tied fast by a strong minister. Its eulogy begins with the image of him wearing the jade seal, which is the image of a legitimate emperor without a state.
The posthumous name they gave him was Huai. The old glossary defines it as kindness and an early cutting off: ci ren duan zhe yue huai. It is not a name for a tyrant or a fool. It is the name for a man who meant well and did not last, and it fits the evidence better than either of the loud judgements that the fall of a dynasty usually attracts.
What can be said for him is specific. He abolished the punishment of the three clans. He restored the audience and the reading of the monthly ordinances, and he talked with his officials about the classics and about business. He called for troops when no one else would call. He tried to leave a city that could not be defended, and when he could not leave he stayed and was taken. He wrote to Gou Xi and destroyed the regent who had humiliated him, and the destruction of that regent cost him the last army of the state. None of these acts was foolish. Each of them was performed with an instrument that had already been broken by fifteen years of civil war.
That is the shape of the reign, and it is why the era name has outlived the man. Yongjia was chosen in 307 to mean a lasting excellence, and it became the name the histories use for the loss of the north: the Yongjia disaster. The name is not a verdict on his character. It is a description of what happened in his four years, to a government that kept doing the right things with a state that had nothing left to do them with.