Emperor Shang of Han

Liu Long was born in the late autumn of 105, the youngest son of Emperor He, and the history does not record his mother's name. His father had lost a dozen sons. The princes died one after another in the nursery, and those born later were secretly sent out of the palace and brought up among common people, so that the court itself could not be certain who lived; the infant who would be emperor was raised in one such house. A little over a hundred days after his birth, on the day his father died, he was named crown prince, and that night he was enthroned. The era name was changed to Yanping, extended peace.
He died eight months later, in the eighth month of 106, before his first birthday, and was buried in the ninth. The whole of his reign is a few hundred words in the standard history, and almost none of them are about him. What the eight months contain is other people's work: edicts issued over an infant's seal, a government run by his father's widow, and a succession arranged in advance that handed the throne to a boy of thirteen who was not his brother. The vacancy is the subject of this account. It is the story of one of the shortest reigns in the Eastern Han, of the regency that filled it, and of the settlement that ended it before it had begun.

1. A Son Raised Outside the Palace

The reign of Emperor He ended in a household emptied of children. Sons had died one after another, a dozen or more by the count of the histories, and the later ones were hidden away among common people on the recorded belief that the palace was a dangerous place to bring up a boy of the imperial line. The Book of the Later Han states it plainly: those born after the deaths were secretly raised among the people, and no officer of the court knew who lived. Liu Long was one of these children, born in the late autumn of 105 to a consort whose name the record does not preserve, and carried off to a private house while the court went on mourning its princes.
Emperor He died in the twelfth month of Yuanxing, in the Zhangde front hall of the palace; he was twenty-seven. On the morning of his death the court had one surviving infant of the imperial line, fetched back from a private house, and one grown son who was an invalid. The Zizhi Tongjian compresses the morning into a sentence: the eldest son Sheng had a chronic illness, the youngest Long was a little over a hundred days old, and Long was brought in and made crown prince. That night, the annals say, he was enthroned. The empress Deng, his father's widow, was named empress dowager and held the court. The Dongguan Hanji, the history compiled at court during the dynasty itself, is blunter about the haste: it was all done in a rush on the day of the death, and the sovereign was still in swaddling clothes.
In the same month, as though to insist that nothing had changed, envoys of the Northern Xiongnu came to Dunhuang and offered submission; their overtures had been refused the year before, when their shanyu asked for a marriage alliance, and the court under the regency received them now. It is the kind of entry that tells a reader what a reign is: no treasury, no law, no campaign, only the arrival of horsemen at a frontier gate in the month a baby was made emperor.
Everything about the arrangement was deliberate. The empress dowager took the child as her own son; the sickly elder brother was given the title prince of Pingyuan in the first month of the new era; and the government passed, in the form prescribed for a minority, to a woman who had been empress since 102 and had spent her years as consort asking for paper and ink instead of rarities and keeping her relatives out of office. What nobody recorded is what the court expected to happen next. Perhaps it expected nothing. Perhaps it expected another funeral.

2. The Regency's First Months

Deng Sui was twenty-six by the Chinese count when she became empress dowager. She was the granddaughter of Deng Yu, first among the generals of the restoration, and the daughter of Deng Xun, whose patience on the Qiang frontier had been mourned by the tribes themselves; she had entered the harem in 96, been named empress in 102 against her refusal, and had used her years as consort to ask for paper and ink instead of rarities and to keep her relatives out of office. The court knew her. What the eight months of Yanping show is how she governed when the obstacle was removed.
The machinery did not have to be invented; it was taken off the shelf. In the first month of Yanping the aged Zhang Yu, who had served three sovereigns, was made grand tutor, and Xu Fang was moved from the ministry over the masses to be defender-in-chief with charge of the secretariat, the record adding that all officers took their orders from the regency. Liang Wei became minister over the masses; Chen Chong died in the fourth month and was replaced as minister of works by Yin Qin. And in the fourth month Deng Zhi, the empress dowager's brother, was raised from the colonelcy of the palace guard to be general of chariots and cavalry. It is the structure the dynasty had used before, a grand tutor to steady the court and the empress's brother to hold the army, and it ran without visible friction.
What the regency did is on record, because the edicts survive, and they are issued in the empress dowager's name over the infant's seal. In the fifth month she proclaimed a general amnesty and ordered that everyone placed under a ban since the founding of the dynasty, whose sentences had been lifted on paper but not in practice by cautious officials, be restored to the status of commoner. In the sixth month, with rain reported from thirty-seven regions, she cut the palace's own consumption: the rare and costly things served by the provisioning offices and the imperial manufactory were to be reduced, and the court was to eat less and dress plainer in sign of the season's disorder. In the same month she ordered the release of the palace women, who had grown more numerous year by year since the restoration, eighty years and more, and of the clansmen enslaved for crimes, all to be made commoners and entered on the registers. In the seventh month she turned on the provincial inspectors: floods had damaged the autumn crops, and the commanderies were reporting inflated acreage and concealed population to win a reputation for abundance, so the governors were to verify the losses in person and remit the land tax and the fodder levy accordingly.
The edicts are the whole of the government that can be seen. They are austere, and they are addressed to faults the regency could name precisely: luxury in the palace, congestion in the harem, false reporting in the provinces, the gap between a pardon and its execution. Whether a court that issued such documents was also a court that could be argued with is another question, and these months do not answer it. The emperor is present in them as an absence. The text of one edict describes him as young and frail, succeeding to a great inheritance, and the empress dowager speaks of herself as holding the reins in aid of him.

3. Eight Months

The rest of the reign is a calendar of other people's business. In the third month the late emperor was buried in the Shen mausoleum and given his temple name, Muzong, the ancestral sovereign; a verdict on seventeen years of rule was thus pronounced in the same spring that the child who had inherited them was still in his first year. In the same month the kings were sent to their fiefs, Qinghe, Jibei, Hejian and Changshan, four princes of the late emperor's generation departing the capital for their states. One of them did not go. Liu Hu, the son of the prince of Qinghe and a boy of thirteen, was kept by special order at the Qinghe residence in Luoyang with his foster mother; the Zizhi Tongjian gives the empress dowager's reason, that the emperor was young and weak and she was taking thought for the unexpected. It was the most consequential decision of the reign, and it was made in the spring.
The frontier sent its usual news. In the fourth month the Xianbei raided Yuyang, and the commandery's governor Zhang Xian pursued them and was killed; the entry is two clauses long and has no sequel. In the fifth month a mountain collapsed in Hedong. There were floods, rain from thirty-seven regions, and a revision of the sacrificial canon, the offices not in the ritual code being abolished. These are the entries of a normal year, which is the point: a dynasty more than eighty years into its restored rule did not stop functioning because its sovereign was an infant, and the record does not treat the fact as remarkable.
Of the emperor himself, the eight months preserve one item. The Dongguan Hanji records an edict in his name cutting back on fine sleeping mats, an entry that survives only because the Taiping Yulan quoted it centuries later and whose text is corrupt; the standard history does not carry it. One cannot read much into a bamboo mat. But it is the single act of the reign attributed to the sovereign, and the fact that it concerns economy in the bedchamber is either a joke of the record or the truth about what an infant's government was for.
He died on the day xinhai in the eighth month, in September 106. Two days later his body was laid in state in the Chongde front hall. The history gives his age as two years, which is the Chinese reckoning, one at birth; he had lived some ten months and a half. The reign, from the night of the accession to the day of the death, ran eight months by the court's calendar, some two hundred and twenty days by ours. No cause is given. The same book that recorded the manner of his father's death, the hall and the hour, records only that the baby died.

4. The Succession Settled Before It Opened

The succession was settled on the night of the death, and the record of it is unusually full, because the settling was done by the regent and the regent had reasons to give. The empress dowager and her brother Deng Zhi, the general of chariots and cavalry, made the decision in the inner palace. That night Deng Zhi was sent with the imperial insignia and a prince's carriage, its canopy of blue, to bring Liu Hu from the Qinghe residence to the palace; the empress dowager took her seat in the Chongde hall, the officers attended in auspicious dress, and the boy was presented and named marquis of Chang'an. Only then was he enthroned. The commentator notes the reason for the intermediate title: he was not to ascend straight from obscurity to the throne.
The edict that accompanied the investiture is the regent's argument, and it deserves to be read as one. The late emperor's eldest son, the prince of Pingyuan, she said, had long suffered a chronic illness; with the ancestral temples in mind the court looked to the line of succession, and there was the marquis of Chang'an, loyal and filial by nature, careful and reverent, versed in the Odes and the Analects, fond of learning and of the ancients, kind to those below him. He was thirteen, and had the mind of a grown man. The Record of Ritual says that a brother's son is as one's own; the principle of the Spring and Autumn Annals is that the adopted heir becomes the son, and does not refuse a grandfather's command because his father gave none. On that authority the marquis was made the heir of the late emperor He, the seal was handed to him, and he was emperor, with the empress dowager still holding the court.
The same history, in another chapter, tells the story differently. The biography of Zhou Zhang, then minister of works, records that the empress dowager had passed over the sick prince because she coveted the baby in swaddling clothes and could raise him as her own son; that when the baby died, the officials, finding the prince's illness less than incurable, looked to him; and that she passed him over now because she had not chosen him before and feared his resentment. The two accounts are not flatly contradictory, but they place the weight differently, and the difference is the whole politics of the succession. One version has the regent obeying a fact about a body. The other has her choosing, twice, the candidate least likely to be angry with her. There is no third account to decide between them.
What was done that night had no precedent in the Eastern Han. Every emperor since the restoration had been the son of his predecessor; this was the first time the throne passed sideways, to the son of an elder brother, and to the son of a man who had himself been crown prince before being destroyed. Liu Qing had been deposed in 82, in the reign of Emperor Zhang, by the empress Dou who had then adopted the future Emperor He; his son's elevation reversed, in the most formal sense, the settlement of a generation earlier. The ritual machinery that made it possible, the adoption of a nephew as son, would be used again and again in the century that followed, for the dynasty was entering the age of the child emperor and the reigning dowager. The arrangement installed in 106 ran, in one form or another, to the end of the Han; its first fifteen years belong to the account of the boy of thirteen and the woman who kept him.

5. Kangling

He was buried in the ninth month, on the day bingyin, in the Kang mausoleum, and the entry is the last the history has to say about him. The tomb was a small thing by the standard of the dynasty: the commentator's note places it inside the precinct of his father's Shen mausoleum, at the geng position, a mound five zhang and five chi high with a circuit of two hundred and eight paces, and the ritual code's gazetteer gives its endowment as some thirteen qing of land. Because the dynasty had buried two emperors in one year and the people were worn out by the labor, the record adds, the underground chambers and all the works of the Kang mausoleum were reduced to one part in ten of what had been planned. No mound answering to the description has been identified inside the Shen precinct in modern survey, and the site's location is not settled; the area was protected, with the rest of the southern group of Eastern Han tombs, in 2013. A child of ten months was given a grave one tenth the size intended, in a graveyard that no one can now point to with certainty.
Two verdicts were passed on him, and the distance between them is a measure of the problem. The Dongguan Hanji, written at court while the dynasty ran, put it in the language of the day: the infant succeeded in swaddling clothes, fell ill, died young by the decree of heaven, the dynastic line was cut in the middle, the altars had no lord, the world was in distress, and all depended on the empress dowager's holding of the court; Confucius once spoke of a woman among the ten capable ministers, the compiler adds, and it was true. That is a contemporary judgment, and it is generous to the regency because the regency was still in power. Fan Ye, writing in the fifth century, disposed of the whole affair in a line of verse appended to the annals: how short the reign of Shang, and the prince of Pingyuan could not bear the weight. His gloss explains that Liu Sheng's illness disqualified him. It is the colder sentence, and it has the advantage of having been written by nobody's client.
The honest account of Liu Long is that there is none. He said nothing that was written down, chose no one, approved nothing that can be traced to his own mind; he was carried into a hall at a hundred days, carried out of it at ten months, and the state he had briefly been continued without a pause. What his short reign produced was not policy but a precedent and a mechanism: a dowager in sole possession of the government, a collateral heir adopted posthumously into the line he inherited, and an example of choosing heirs for their pliancy. The dynasty would use all three again, and each time the child would be younger or the regent more entrenched. He was the first of the little emperors, and the emptiness of his record is the truest thing about him.