Emperor Yuan of Wei

In the sixth month of 260 a boy of fifteen was brought from Ye, the old capital of the Wei house in the north-east, and set on the throne in Luoyang. He was a grandson of Cao Cao and the son of a prince, and he was the last of the five men who wore the crown of Wei. He reigned five years, and in that time he did not command an army, choose a minister, or decide a case. The three things that happened in his reign were the conquest of the southern state of Shu Han, the revolt and death of the general who had won it, and the surrender of the throne itself to the family that had governed the state since he was a child. He gave up the crown at twenty and lived another thirty-seven years in a walled town in the north, ranked above every noble of the dynasty that had replaced him, and died an old man in his bed.
He had no posthumous name and no temple name from his own house. The name by which he is known, Emperor Yuan, is not a Wei name at all: it was given to him by the court of the Jin dynasty in the year he died, and this account presents him by it because it is the only one he has. He spent his reign signing what other men had decided, and he is remembered by a word he never heard spoken in his presence.

1. The Duke of Changdao

He was born in 246 and he was the son of Cao Yu, the prince of Yan, one of the youngest of Cao Cao's sons. Of his childhood the record preserves almost nothing. He was raised as one of a large number of imperial clansmen, held at a distance from the court and given the kind of title meant to keep a prince quiet and harmless. In 258, at twelve, he was made duke of the township of Changdao, in Anci county. Two years later he was emperor.
The way it happened set the pattern of his life. In the fifth month of 260 the reigning emperor, Cao Mao, led the household servants and the guards of his own palace into the streets of Luoyang against the regent Sima Zhao, and was killed there by one of Sima Zhao's officers. It removed an emperor who would not consent, and it left the house of Sima needing a successor who would consent to everything.
The choice fell on the duke of Changdao. He was fetched from Ye not by the regent but by the regent's son, Sima Yan, then a commander of the palace guard. The empress dowager Guo, the widow of the emperor Ming, issued the edict of accession, and on the day before he took the throne she issued a second order that he take a new name. The reason given is preserved: the name he had been born with, Huang, was too common a word, so that every clerk and petitioner would have had to alter a phrase to avoid it, and a taboo that costs the whole country a syllable is a burden a government does not want. He was renamed Huan. On the second day of the sixth month of 260 he entered the Taiji hall and took the throne, at fifteen by the count of the time, and the era was changed to Jingyuan, and an amnesty went out.
His accession carried one formality that shaped the rest of his life. He was made emperor not as the son of the old emperor but as the adopted heir of a dead one. The emperor Ming, Cao Rui, had died in 239 and his line had ended with him, and the two boys who came after him had both been taken into it, first Cao Fang, then Cao Mao, and now the duke of Changdao. The consequence was that he could not serve his own private kin, and his father the prince of Yan therefore became his collateral grandfather. In the eleventh month of 260 the old prince sent up a memorial at the winter solstice signing it in the form a minister used. The new emperor tried to exempt him, and the officials of ritual refused, on the ground that a man given to the ancestral line could not turn back to his own blood; the compromise was that in letters the emperor might call him the prince of Yan, while in the formal documents of state the ordinary law would run. The boy of fifteen had become, in law, the son of a dead man and the grandson of his own father.
Within days of the accession he did the first thing asked of him, which was to heap honours on the man who had made him. In the sixth month he sent an envoy with the patent making Sima Zhao chancellor of state and duke of Jin, with an increase of two commanderies to bring his fief to ten, and adding the nine bestowments, the set of archaic gifts that marked a man as standing one step below the throne. Sima Zhao refused the whole of it, and the court, having made the offer, accepted the refusal. The offer would be made again in each of the following years and refused again. This was not a quarrel between the emperor and his minister. It was a liturgy performed by both of them, and the part assigned to the emperor was to read the words aloud.
One institution of his house has to be described here, because it is the reason for everything that came later. The princes of the blood had for two generations been kept out of office, out of the capital, and out of one another's company. They were given titles and revenues and moved from one provincial town to another, forbidden to correspond, forbidden to come to court, and watched by officers appointed for the purpose. The severity was itself a policy, since it had been designed to make a usurpation impossible. It had the opposite effect, and slowly. When the house of Sima took the government, there was no prince with troops, with a following, or with the habit of acting, and the arrangement meant to secure the Cao throne spent the last years of its life securing its surrender instead.

2. The Decision

For two years after the accession the court was quiet, and the state went on offering the regent the honours that had once belonged to the emperor. The real business of the government was not in the palace but in the office of the general-in-chief, and the real problem there was reputation rather than policy.
In the fifth month of 260 an emperor of Wei had died in the street with a weapon in his body, and the man who stood to inherit the empire had ordered the deed. Every form of legitimacy in the Chinese political vocabulary had one requirement that the house of Sima now lacked, and no number of memorials, portents, and refusals could supply it. It wanted a deed. The regent's father and elder brother had spent twenty years removing their rivals one at a time, and each removal had made the last transfer harder to disguise. What the house needed was a victory large enough to be described as a service rendered to the world.
The opportunity lay in the south-west. Shu Han, the state in the Sichuan basin that claimed to continue the Han, had been the smaller of the two surviving rivals for a generation. It had been governed since its founder's death by a succession of regents, generals, and favourites; its last campaigns had drained its treasury without holding ground; and its emperor, Liu Shan, had long since handed the business of government to a palace eunuch. Sima Zhao judged the enterprise simple, and the sentence in which he judged it has been preserved: the enemy's soldiers were worn and their people exhausted, and to attack them would be like looking at his own palm.
What he met was objection. The court, from the highest ministers downwards, was against the campaign. The roads across the Qinling range could not feed an army, and the country on the far side was a single enclosed plain behind a wall of passes. Only one senior man spoke for it, and he was the man who would be given the army, the inspector of the capital, Zhong Hui. Sima Zhao answered the objectors not with an argument but with the appointment of a supervisor, and then he levied a hundred and eighty thousand men out of the provinces, and the court that had been against a campaign was against it no longer.
When the plan was fixed, one of his officers asked him the question that everyone near him must have been turning over. Shao Di observed that Zhong Hui was being given more than a hundred thousand men and would be, once he was over the mountains, beyond any check, and asked whether it would not be safer to send another man. Sima Zhao's answer, as the chronicle keeps it, was that he understood the objection very well, that a campaign could be made to look easy only by a commander who believed in it, and that when the deed was done he would know how to deal with what came after.
The disposition the histories give divided the levy into three columns. Deng Ai took some thirty thousand men to hold Jiang Wei, the Shu commander, in place in the far west; Zhuge Xu took a like force to cut his road home; and Zhong Hui had the main body, more than a hundred thousand, and the roads into Hanzhong. Above all three of them Sima Zhao put not a general but a supervisor: Wei Guan, the commandant of justice, held the tally of authority over both armies, and he was the regent's own man.
The army left Luoyang in the eighth month of 263. There was a sacrifice and a review of the troops, and at the ceremony a general who said again, in front of the assembled ranks, that the expedition could not be made, was beheaded where he stood.
In the tenth month the court offered Sima Zhao the dukedom of Jin once more, and this time he took it, with the nine bestowments and the chancellorship of state. The fourth asking had come in the same year in which three columns of the empire's army were on the march, and the coincidence was not one. A man about to be given the throne must be seen to have earned it, and the earning must be visible while it is being done.

3. The Campaign in the Mountains

The campaign opened with a collapse that was the enemy's own work. The Wei army found the forward passes of Hanzhong lightly held, because the Shu commander had decided some years before to concentrate his garrisons in the fortified towns of the plain. Zhong Hui's forward commander took the pass at Yang'an after the officer holding it gave it up, and the main body entered the plain of Hanzhong without a battle. The two towns held out behind him with their stores, and the road to Shu's capital lay open in front of him.
Jiang Wei had been in the far west, at Tazhong, and came back at the news. He outmarched the column posted to cut his retreat, joined the troops sent north to meet him, and fell back on the Jian Ge pass, the narrowest place in the road that leads from the north into the plain of Chengdu. A road narrow enough is nearly impossible to force, and Zhong Hui could not force it. He attacked the pass and failed; his supply over the mountains began to fail; and in the eleventh month he was speaking of withdrawal.
What saved it was a move made without permission. When the columns were being planned, Deng Ai had proposed that, if the direct road were held, a force should leave it alone and go west over the uninhabited mountains and come out behind the Shu army in the plain. He had been refused, and now, while Zhong Hui sat before the pass, Deng Ai took his own column and did it. He led it through country with no road and no villages, cutting a way as he went, and came out at Jiangyou in the plain, where the officer in command gave up the place without a fight. From Jiangyou he went on towards the capital, and there, at Mianzhu, he met the last Shu field army that could be raised and destroyed it, and its commander, Zhuge Zhan, was killed in the fighting. Zhuge Zhan was the son of the chancellor who had kept Shu alive for a decade and died in the field a generation before.
The capital had nothing left. In the eleventh month Liu Shan sent his envoys with the seals and the patent of submission to Deng Ai's camp, and the state was ended. What followed was not a general's work. Acting on his own authority as a commander in the field, Deng Ai gave the surrendered sovereign a rank of the Wei nobility, appointed his own officers to the provinces he had taken, and sent a memorial to Luoyang proposing that the army should stay in Shu and that the conquest of Wu should be prepared from the upper river. It was the reasoning of a man who had spent his life doing his work and reporting it afterwards, and a regent who intended to be emperor could not permit it in a province so far from the capital.
The rebuke came through the supervisor. Sima Zhao sent Wei Guan to remind Deng Ai that matters of this kind were to be reported and not executed, and that the throne's instruction should be waited for. Deng Ai answered that he had come out under the emperor's tally and would not put his own safety before the state's business. At the end of the year the court gave its rewards: Deng Ai was made grand commandant and Zhong Hui was made minister over the masses, the two highest posts a soldier could hold. Neither would live long enough to take up either office.
The news reached the south-east before it reached some parts of the north. Wu, whose whole western strategy had rested on an ally in the Sichuan basin, sent a force up the river towards the pass at Yong'an, and found the officer holding it unwilling to hand it over.

4. The Cage and the Mutiny

The winter that followed the conquest broke the two men who had won it. Zhong Hui had the larger army and the smaller share of the credit, and the credit had gone to a general who had done his work without asking and who now proposed to stay in the conquered country with an army of his own. In the twelfth month of 263 Zhong Hui and Wei Guan together sent up word that Deng Ai had shown the signs of rebellion, and Zhong Hui, who was a skilful forger of other men's hands, took a hand himself in the evidence: he stopped Deng Ai's memorials at the pass, altered the language so that they read as proud and self-willed, and rewrote the regent's replies to make the old general suspicious and afraid.
Sima Zhao's answer came down in the first month of 264. It was a decree to bring Deng Ai back to the capital in a cage-cart, not a sentence of death but a summons that carried the accused man's person out of the hands of his own troops. He sent a general, Jia Chong, with more than ten thousand men into the Xie valley to hold the town of Lecheng, and took the field himself with a hundred thousand more and moved west to Chang'an. Since the princes of the blood were all lodged at Ye and could not be left unwatched while the central army was away, he detached Shan Tao with five hundred soldiers to keep Ye quiet. And he took the emperor with him. The young sovereign of Wei travelled west in the regent's train, with the princes behind him held in their town by a guard of five hundred men. It was as near as he ever came to a campaign.
The arrest was given to Wei Guan, and Zhong Hui arranged it to fail in a way that would help him. Wei Guan was told to go into Chengdu ahead of the main body with a small escort; Zhong Hui expected that Deng Ai's veterans would kill him, and that the killing of a supervisor of justice would settle the charge against Deng Ai beyond argument. Wei Guan understood the design and could not refuse the order, so he did the one thing that could not be answered. He went into Chengdu at night and sent men through the camp of Deng Ai's own army with a proclamation: the throne had ordered the arrest of Deng Ai and of nobody else, and every officer who came over to the government's side would keep his rank and the rewards of the campaign. By cockcrow the officers of the camp had come over, all but the handful inside Deng Ai's own tent. At dawn Wei Guan drove in and took the sleeping general and his son; when the camp stirred, he came out without a guard, promised to state the case himself, and wrote the memorial out in front of them, and the officers dispersed.
Deng Ai went east in the cage, and Zhong Hui came into Chengdu on the fifteenth day of the first month, and was now the only commander left in the west with a great army. He had the surrendered troops of Shu and their general, Jiang Wei, at his side, and Jiang Wei had understood before anyone what such a man might be persuaded to do. On the next day Zhong Hui gathered the officers and the surviving officials of the old Shu court in the audience hall of Chengdu and announced that the empress dowager Guo had left a testament calling on him to raise the army and remove Sima Zhao from the government. The dowager had been dead for a month, and no such document was ever produced; what was produced was a board on which the officers were told to write their names in agreement. Some of them would not. Zhong Hui had them shut up in the government offices of Yi province under guard, and kept Wei Guan with him.
The end came with an absurdity. One of Zhong Hui's favourites, a junior officer who had once served another general in the camp, obtained permission to send a servant into the prison rooms to bring his old commander food, and the other officers, by the same permission, sent servants of their own. Through those servants a rumour went out among the troops, not of a plan but of a purpose: that Zhong Hui had dug pits and cut white rods, and meant to kill the officers one by one and bury them. It was false and it did the work of a true report, because the army wanted nothing so much as to go home. On the eighteenth day of the first month the troops of the imprisoned generals came to the walls without an order from anyone above them, drove into the city, and set it on fire. Jiang Wei and Zhong Hui were killed in the fighting, Jiang Wei with his own weapons in his hands and Zhong Hui running through the halls of the palace he had seized.
The sack that followed was worse than the invasion. The army of the conquest, with its officers dead or hidden, broke up into plunderers and spent several days in the city of Chengdu, and the disorder was brought down only when Wei Guan came out and took charge of the generals again. Then he dealt with the one man who could still undo him. Deng Ai's own troops had caught up with the cage-cart on the road and turned it back towards Chengdu, and Wei Guan, who had helped to build the accusation, sent a subordinate named Tian Xu after him, a man with a private grievance from the previous campaign, telling him that now he might avenge the shame of that day. The cart was overtaken near Mianzhu and the general and his son were killed there. No decree of the throne ordered it.
Sima Zhao came back from Chang'an in the spring with the empire's west settled and the last obstacle to the transfer gone. In the third month the court did the business of a conquest. The surrendered Liu Shan was made duke of Anle and taken east to Luoyang; the Shu territory was reorganized as provinces of the empire; and the ancestral sacrifices of the house of Liu were brought to an end, so that the state that had called itself Han ceased to exist even in ritual. In the same months Sima Zhao took the title of prince of Jin, the last rank before the throne, and his own father and elder brother were given the posthumous royal titles of the house of Jin, so that the coming dynasty would have the ancestors it needed.
In the fifth month of 264 the era was changed to Xianxi. The emperor who signed the edicts of that spring was nineteen, and he had by now signed a conquest, a mutiny, a purge, and a change of era, none of which had been decided in his presence. What was left for the Wei government to do in the time that remained it did without praise, because the men who did it were already the government of another dynasty. The military colonies that had long fed the armies of the north were wound up, and settlers were encouraged to move from the exhausted Sichuan basin into the interior, with two years of grain and twenty years free of tax. These were the ordinances of a state that knew it was being wound up, and they were issued in the name of a boy who had not chosen one of them.

5. The Regalia

The last phase of the reign was given to the preparation of its end, and the preparation was largely a matter of costume. Through the late months of 264 the honours of the heir of Jin accumulated around Sima Yan, the regent's son: in the eighth month he was made assistant to the chancellorship; in the ninth, general of the imperial guard; in the tenth, by an edict of the emperor, he was named heir of the house of Jin. So, in the fifth month of 265, was the last and greatest of the edicts, in which a Wei emperor defined the ceremonial rank of the man about to take his throne.
The edict granted the prince of Jin the use of the banners and insignia of a Son of Heaven; the clearing of the road before him when he went abroad and the guard behind him when he entered; the carriage of the golden root drawn by six horses, with the five seasonal carriages in attendance; the dance of eight rows at his sacrifices; and the crown with twelve strings of beads hanging before the face, which belonged to an emperor alone. His consort was to be called queen and his heir was to be called crown prince. Every one of those privileges was a piece of the imperial office, detached and given away, and the man who gave them away signed his own reduction. The emperor had finished making his successor, and the only thing left for him to do was to notice it.
He did not have long to wait. In the eighth month of 265 the prince of Jin, Sima Zhao, died in his chamber after a short illness, at fifty-five. He had held the government of Wei for a decade, and he died four months short of the throne he had spent a lifetime preparing, leaving the last step to his son. Sima Yan took his father's offices the next day, the chancellorship of state and the princedom of Jin, and the court that had been built by the family over two decades closed ranks around him without a contest.
Then the pressure began, in the accustomed form. Men close to the regent began to urge the emperor to retire; the emperor, who had never had an opinion that was asked for, sent down a decree in the twelfth month offering the throne to the prince of Jin, on the ground that the mandate of heaven did not stay in one family and that the house of Sima had preserved and saved the state. The prince of Jin declined. The decree went up again, and after the appointed number of refusals he consented, because the form required that all the reluctance be on the receiving side. The moving was done by other men, as everything in this reign had been.

6. The Prince of Chenliu

On the sixteenth day of the twelfth month of 265 the last of the ceremonies was held. It was not a great public rite but a sacrifice at the southern altar outside Luoyang, and the patent of abdication was carried to the altar by the grand protector of Wei, Zheng Chong, and read out in the emperor's name. The prince of Jin received it there and then entered the palace and took his seat in the Taiji hall, where Cao Huan had taken the throne five years before. The new era was proclaimed as Taishi; the amnesty went out; the debts of the empire were cancelled and the roads and markets were made free of toll for a year; the offices taken away in the great purges were restored to their families, and the old quarrels were declared at an end. It was the second time in half a century that the throne of China had changed hands in this way, and it was carried off with the same words and the same absolutions.
The terms on which the last Wei emperor surrendered his office were settled in the two days that followed. On the day after the accession a decree conferred on him the title of prince of Chenliu, gave him a fief of ten thousand households at the old northern capital of Ye, and reduced the other princes of the Wei house to the rank of county marquis. On the third day a second decree set out what he was to be allowed, and the list is the exact measure of what the new dynasty thought of the old one. He was to carry the banners of a Son of Heaven; to keep the five seasonal carriages of an emperor; to keep the calendar and the first day of the year of the Wei house; and to sacrifice to heaven and earth with the rites and the music of Wei, exactly as they had been at the founding. His letters to the throne were not to be those of a subject. He was, in other words, to remain an emperor in everything but the actual business of ruling, which had not been his in any case.
The title chosen for him deserves a pause, because the histories do not remark on it and it is hard to believe it was an accident. The prince of Chenliu was the style that Liu Xie, the last emperor of the Han, had borne in his boyhood, in the months of 189 when he was a prince waiting to be made emperor; and Chenliu was also the place in the eastern plain from which Cao Cao, this emperor's grandfather, had raised his first army. On a man who had lost the throne of Wei the new dynasty placed a title that recalled both the founder of his house and the last emperor of the house it had itself replaced, and it made him, in the language of the rites, a guest of the state rather than a subject. Two years later the court settled him into the company of the other honoured remnant, the duke of Shanyang, who was a descendant of the Han emperor.
His own family was subject to the same arithmetic. In 278 his father, the old prince of Yan, died, a pensioner of the Jin under the reduced title of duke, and the emperor of Jin ordered that the prince of Chenliu should not go into mourning for him. The reason was the one the ritual officials had given eighteen years before: a man given to the ancestral line of the emperor Ming could not turn back to serve his own father. Of the rest of his life the record keeps almost nothing. His consort, the former empress of the house of Bian, disappears from the histories at the moment of the transfer, and no children of his are named in the standard sources.
The proscriptions that had shaped his house were lifted in the same week as the transfer, and the timing was not accidental. In the last days of the year 265 the new emperor ordered that the confinement under which the clansmen of the Wei house had lived should be ended, and in the second month of the following year he ended the same confinement for the clan of the Han. The prohibitions had been the invention of the Wei dynasty itself, the means by which its founder had made his own house safe from its own cousins, and now the conqueror removed them as a gesture of new mercy, at a moment when the house they had crippled had nothing left to lift. It cost the Jin nothing. The princes of Cao had been kept without office, without armies, and without one another for two generations, and the last of them was a man who had never given an order. The policy designed to prevent a usurpation in the house of Cao had spent itself preventing a resistance to the usurper, and the man who benefited from it most was the new emperor, who had no reason whatever to fear the prince he had made.
For a century and more the title of prince of Chenliu was carried by Cao Huan and his heirs, and its holders were treated as the descendants of the house that had held the mandate before. The title was held by a family of Cao from 265 to 479, when the founder of the Southern Qi abolished it on the ground that a house two dynasties back no longer belonged among the honoured guests of the present one. It had lasted two hundred and fourteen years, longer than the Western Jin and longer than the Eastern Jin, and when the north was lost it was carried across the river and re-established in the south.
Cao Huan died in the first year of the Tai'an era of the emperor Hui of Jin, which the standard reckoning gives as 302, at fifty-eight by the count of the age or fifty-six by the Western count; a few later hands put the year at 303. He was buried with the honours of an emperor, and the court of the Jin gave him a posthumous name, the only one he has ever had. It called him Yuan, a word for the beginning or the origin of a thing, and the Jin's own gloss, preserved among the fragments of the period, was that it marked a man who had done the right thing and pleased the people by yielding his throne. Wei had never given him a name; the men who took his empire decided how the last of the Cao would be remembered, and they chose a word that praised him for the one act of his life that had been theirs.
Chen Shou, who had served the fallen state of Shu and wrote his history under the Jin, gave no separate book to any of the last three emperors of Wei. He put them together in one volume, the Annals of the Three Heirs, and this emperor stands last in it. The choice was his own, not one his dynasty required: Wei was the legitimate line for the Jin, and the three men who founded and held it had each been given an annal of his own. The last three were not, because the historian, who knew exactly what had happened, would not pretend that their years had been governed by the men whose names they carried.
His own sentence on Cao Huan is short and exact. The prince of Chenliu, he wrote, sat gravely facing south while the ministers conducted the government; he respectfully followed the established forms and yielded the throne; and so he obtained a great fief and lived as a guest of the house of Jin, and compared with the duke of Shanyang his rank and his favour were the greater. The words are almost warm, and the reason is that Chen Shou is describing a man who did nothing at all: not a wise ruler, not a brave one, not even a stubborn one, but a model of compliance. It is the highest praise his position allowed him to give, and it is also a way of saying that there was no reign to judge.
The other early judgements run in the same track. A historian of the Yuan said that he had known the mandate had passed and had folded his hands and waited for it. What none of them disputes is the fact underneath the judgement. This was the only one of the three last emperors of Wei who was neither deposed nor killed, and the reason is not that he was more careful than Cao Fang or more prudent than Cao Mao. It is that by the time the throne came to him there was nothing left in the hand of the man who held it. The Wei princes had been disarmed by their own family's law, the government had been in the hands of the Sima for a decade and a half, and the empire's armies answered to men whose fathers had never served the Cao. He was made emperor at fifteen because he would consent, kept at the head of the state for five years because his presence cost nothing, and given up to the new dynasty in an afternoon of ceremony because he had nothing to give up but the office he was named for. He survived his throne by thirty-seven years, and the small honour of the arrangement, that he was treated as a guest and not a captive, was bought by the fact that a captive would have been more trouble than he was worth.