Liu He

The History of Han gave him no chapter of his own. Every other Western Han emperor has a set of annals. Liu He has nothing of the kind, because the dynasty did not count him. What survives of him is scattered through the chapters of other men: the biography of the regent who put him on the throne and took him off it, the biography of his own father, a governor's report of an inspection, a line in the treatise on the heavens. He is a man the record mentions but never addresses.
What the record does say about him is memorable, and it is memorable in a particular way. He held the throne for twenty-seven days in 74 BC and was deposed; and the dossier drawn up against him, read aloud in the presence of the empress dowager by a secretary of the court, says that in those twenty-seven days his envoys went out holding tallies and requisitioned things from every office of the government, one thousand one hundred and twenty-seven times. In the two thousand years since, that number has hardened into a character: the emperor who did 1,127 wicked things in less than a month. The king who was not fit to be emperor became, in the popular tradition, the emperor who was not fit to be a man.
Then the ground contradicted the book. In the spring of 2011 a gang of looters came at night to a low hill south of the Yangzi, in the deep south of the Han realm. They were caught; the mound they had opened was excavated; and in March 2016 the archaeologists announced that the tomb belonged to Liu He. What came out of it — a lacquered mirror painted on the back with the image of Confucius, five thousand bamboo slips of the classics, sets of bells, two million coins, and a hundred and fifteen kilograms of gold — is not a document about the twenty-seven days. It is a portrait of a man the dossier had no reason to describe. This essay is about the distance between the two.

1. The House of Changyi

To understand what Liu He was chosen for, it helps to understand what his family had nearly been.
His grandmother was the Lady Li, the singer's sister whom Emperor Wu took into the palace in the years when his great generals were winning the north, and who died young and was remembered in song as a beauty that could topple a city. Her family rose with her. One brother, Li Yannian, was the court musician who brought her to the emperor's notice with a song; the other, Li Guangli, became a general and led the armies of the far west. In 97 BC the emperor enfeoffed her son, his fifth son, as King of Changyi, a rich territory in southwestern Shandong, and gave the boy the scholar Xiahou Shichang as his tutor. Everything about the enfeoffment pointed one way: this was a line being kept ready.
The line failed, and it failed loudly. In 90 BC the chancellor Liu Qumao, who was tied by marriage to the Li family, and Li Guangli, who was the boy's uncle, were found to have been plotting to have the King of Changyi made crown prince in place of the disgraced heir. The plot was reported; the chancellor was executed by being cut in half at the waist; Li Guangli, in the field against the Xiongnu, went over to the enemy, and his clan was destroyed. The King of Changyi had no part in it that the record reports, and he was not punished. He was left where he was, and he died there in the first month of 88 BC, the year before the emperor named his youngest son to succeed him.
Liu He was his father's only son. He was five years old when the title came to him. By the time he was a young man he had, on paper, everything a king of a commandery could have and, in fact, nothing that could protect him. His mother's family was gone, his father's line had been touched by treason, and he had been raised at a provincial court several hundred miles from the capital by ministers who spent their years trying to manage him.
Three of them are worth naming, because they reappear at the end of his life as the men who were not executed. Wang Shi taught him the Odes — the collection of three hundred and five poems that was, in that world, the whole of moral education. Gong Sui was the master of his household guard, and Wang Ji his commandant. Gong Sui is the one the history lets us see clearly. He remonstrated constantly, and the young king, who liked him, would put his hands over his ears and walk away, saying that the master of the guard was very good at making a man ashamed of himself. When Gong Sui once wept and crawled forward on his knees to beg him to reform, Liu He was moved enough to let him pick ten scholars of good conduct to live with him and read him the Documents and the Odes; a few days later he could not bear them and sent them home.
The record of these years is a record of warnings. Gong Sui told him the parable of the King of Jiaoxi, who had been ruled by a flatterer named Hou De — a man who assured the king, whose conduct was the conduct of Jie and the tyrant Zhou, that he was the equal of Yao and Shun, and who was with him when his state was destroyed. He asked the king which of the three hundred and five poems described his own way of living. And when the portents came — a dog as tall as a man with a human-shaped head, wearing a scholar's cap; a bear that only the king could see; blood on his seat — Gong Sui read them all the same way: the men around him were the unnatural thing, and if he did not get rid of them he would lose his state. Liu He looked up at the sky and said that malevolent things kept coming to him; he did not change.

2. The Summons

In the fourth month of 74 BC, Emperor Zhao of Han died in the Weiyang Palace, at the age of twenty-one, without a son. The regent who had governed the empire for the boy's whole life now had to govern the succession, and the choice he made was the beginning of everything that happened to Liu He.
The obvious heir was the King of Guangling, Liu Xu, the only one of Emperor Wu's sons still living: an experienced, powerful, and famously disorderly man whom the ministers themselves proposed. Huo Guang refused him. The ground he gave — the regent's enemies said he had invented it later — was that the late emperor had pronounced the King of Guangling unfit; the argument that moved the court was Tian Yannian's, that the regent should do what Yi Yin had done, and depose an unworthy heir for the sake of the altars of the state. The ministers, who had come in favouring Guangling, went out saying that the fate of the people lay with the general and that they would do as he directed.
The man Huo Guang sent for was, on any reading, chosen because of what he lacked. The King of Changyi was the nephew of the dead emperor, eighteen or nineteen years old, from a line whose powerful relatives had been destroyed a generation earlier; he had no brothers, no maternal kin worth counting, and no faction at the capital. He was also, on the evidence the regent had, a young man who liked hunting, music, and the company of his own people. What Huo Guang wanted was a sovereign who would inherit the arrangement of 87 BC and leave it standing. What he selected was a young man whom the arrangement had no reason to fear.
The summons arrived as a sealed imperial letter, and the record of what happened next is detailed enough to be read as a scene. The letter was opened by the king at about one in the morning, by candlelight, and read to him by the envoy's party; the men who carried it were a deputy of the court herald, a member of the imperial clan, a senior official who had once guarded a prisoner who would one day be emperor, and a colonel of the palace. By noon the king had set out. By the evening of the first day he had already covered a hundred and thirty-five li, and the horses of his escort began to die on the road, until Gong Sui persuaded him to send fifty of his officers back. Wang Ji, his commandant, had told him before he left to serve the general-in-chief with respect and to leave the whole government in his hands.
What he did on the road became part of the case against him. At Jiyang he bought cocks with long crowing and bamboo staffs; at Hongnong he let a servant called Shan carry women who had been seized from the villages in the cart that was supposed to hold his clothes. Word of it reached the court before he did; an envoy met him and raised the matter with the chancellor of Changyi, who passed it to Gong Sui, who asked the king about it. The king said it had not happened. Gong Sui said that if it had not, he should still hand over the servant rather than let one man ruin his name, and seized Shan himself and delivered him to the guards for judgement.
At Bashang, outside the capital, the court herald met him and the imperial carriage was brought out for him. From there the ritual took over, and the ritual was where he began to fail. Coming up to the eastern gate of the capital, Gong Sui told him that by the rules a man arriving to mourn weeps as soon as he sees the city. The king said that his throat hurt and that he could not weep. At the gate he said that the gate was the same as the outer one. Only at the eastern gate of the Weiyang Palace, when Gong Sui told him to dismount, face the palace and wail as long as the grief took him, did he do it. On the first day of the sixth month he entered, performed the mourning, and received the imperial seal and cord: he was, from that moment, the emperor, adopted as the heir of Emperor Zhao and the son, in law, of the empress dowager who would speak against him four weeks later.
There was one thing he never did, and the men who removed him made it the legal centre of their case. He never went to the temple of the founder and reported his accession to the ancestors. In the constitutional theory of the Han, an emperor was not emperor because a seal had been put into his hand; he was emperor because he had received his mandate in the ancestral temple of the founding emperor, and until that happened he had not been formally entrusted with the succession to the line, and could not claim it. He held the title for twenty-seven days without making that journey. Whether he understood what he was leaving undone, or whether he was simply given no time, the record does not say.

3. Twenty-Seven Days

What the king is alleged to have done in those twenty-seven days is known to us almost entirely through one document: the memorial of impeachment that Huo Guang and the assembled ministers laid before the empress dowager, read out by the head of the imperial secretariat in the hall called Chengming. That is the source of every accusation in the History of Han's chapter on Huo Guang, and it is the reason the case has to be read as a case — a prosecution's file, drafted by the men who were at that moment gathering the palace guards and shutting the gates. The historians who have handled it most carefully have said so: the modern scholar Lü Simian wrote flatly that the charges against the King of Changyi are not to be believed, and Liao Boyuan argued a generation ago that the whole proceeding was a struggle for power dressed as a question of conduct.
The charges themselves fall into three kinds. The first is mourning offences: that he ate meat on the road and had chickens and pigs bought for him outside the palace during the mourning, and told his household officers to prepare the emperor's ordinary meals without consulting the officer whose duty it was to prevent exactly that; that after the funeral he went into the front hall and struck the bells and chimes; and that while the late emperor still lay in the front hall he had the instruments of the music office brought out and the musicians of Changyi brought in to drum and sing and play-act. The second is the use of imperial property: that he opened the seal and did not seal it again; that he took sixteen tallies and had his attendants carry them in relays while he made his mourning visits; that he drove the imperial carriage, tiger-skin and pennants and all, out to the northern palaces after boar and tigers; that he sent for the empress dowager's pony-cart and let slaves drive it about the women's quarters for sport; that he gave out gold, coins, swords, jades and silks from the privy treasury to the men he played with; that he promised a favourite a thousand catties of gold to marry ten wives; and that he took the seal-cords proper to kings, marquises and ministers and tied them on his own Changyi officials and freed slaves. The third is sexual and religious: that he had relations with the late emperor's palace women, one of them named Meng, and decreed the waist-slicing of anyone who spoke of it; and that before the ancestral temples of the dynasty had been served, he sent a sealed letter and a triple sacrifice of the great offering to the tomb-shrine of his own father, the dead King of Changyi, calling himself in it the heir-son emperor.
That last charge is the one that shows what the case was really about. To sacrifice to his father as "heir-son emperor" was to say that he was the son of the King of Changyi and not the heir of Emperor Zhao; and to be the heir of Emperor Zhao was the whole basis on which he had been brought to the capital at all. It was a claim about legitimacy, dressed as a question of ritual propriety. It is also the charge that connects most directly to the one action of his reign which no one disputes: the promotions. He had brought his own household with him and was placing its men in the offices around him, above all by making the former chancellor of Changyi the commander of the guards of the empress dowager's palace — the post that controlled the gates of the palace in which she lived. A minor official named Zhang Chang, a deputy of the imperial carriage service, wrote to him about it at the time, in the plainest language in the whole affair: the great ministers who support the state have received no honours, and the small attendants of Changyi are promoted first; this is the greatest of your errors. The promotions and the irregular sacrifices and the refusal to report to the ancestral temple are all the same act seen from different sides: the behaviour of a man who intended to be emperor of the Han in his own right rather than the ward of a regent.
And then there is the number. The memorial says that in the twenty-seven days since he received the seal his envoys were perpetually in motion, holding the tallies and requiring the various offices of the government to deliver men and goods, and that the total came to one thousand one hundred and twenty-seven. It is worth being exact about what that sentence counts. It counts requisitions — official demands made through the proper channel of a tally-bearing envoy — not misdeeds; that is what the words say. The reading that turned the number into crimes is old — it goes back at least to the late Han, where the scholar Lu Zhi said in a memorial that the King of Changyi ruled for twenty-seven days and committed more than a thousand offences, which is why Huo Guang deposed him — and it has been the popular version ever since. Both readings point at the same political reality. A new emperor who issues more than a thousand requisitions in twenty-seven days is an emperor who has decided to use the machinery of government himself, and a regent whose whole position rests on that machinery running through his own hands will read the number as an emergency. But a reader who takes "1,127 wicked deeds" as the finding of an inquiry has taken the arithmetic of an indictment for the verdict of a court.
The mechanics of the removal were worked out in the weeks before it happened, and the sequence is preserved without much adornment.
Huo Guang's first move was to secure the two men whose forces could decide the matter: Tian Yannian, the grand minister of agriculture, who was his own man, and Zhang Anshi, the general of chariots and cavalry. They approached the chancellor Yang Chang with the plan, and the record is at pains to say how frightened he was. Then they called the ministers together. At the meeting Huo Guang put the question in a form that had already decided it: the King of Changyi behaves with disorder and endangers the altars of the state; what is to be done? The ministers, by the history's account, said nothing and assented to everything. Then Tian Yannian rose, put his hand on his sword, and told the assembled company that the late emperor had entrusted the young sovereign to the general, that the general's reputation as a loyal servant could not be allowed to be destroyed by a single man, and that whoever did not agree at once to the deposition could be dealt with by the sword he was holding. Huo Guang thanked him and said that the reproach was just. After that there was only one opinion in the room.
The empress dowager was the regent's own granddaughter. She had been brought into the palace as a child of six and made empress the same year, and she was now fourteen or fifteen years old, and the decree of deposition would be issued in her name. She came to the Chengming hall in a robe sewn with pearls, behind a curtain with weapons set about it, with several hundred guards in the courtyard and halberd-bearers on the steps, and she summoned the king to hear a decree. The king, who did not yet know what was happening, asked what crime he was being summoned for.
The hall was arranged so that there would be no resistance in it. When Liu He came in, the gates were shut behind him and his Changyi officials were left outside; he asked what that was for, and Huo Guang, kneeling, told him that the empress dowager had ordered that the Changyi officials were not to come in. He said, by the history's account, that they should take things slowly and not make it so frightening. The two hundred or more Changyi officers and attendants were taken outside and bound and handed to the prison of the commandant of justice. Huo Guang gave the men watching the king an instruction that tells us what he expected: guard him carefully, he said, for if the King of Changyi should die suddenly or kill himself, I should have to answer to the empire for the death of a lord.
Then the head of the imperial secretariat read out the memorial. The founding emperor had made the Han and was therefore its great ancestor; Emperor Wen had governed with kindness and frugality and was therefore its great exemplar; the present one, made heir to Emperor Zhao, had behaved in a way that forfeited the name. It quoted the Odes: he is called a child, and yet he has children of his own. Among the five punishments, none is greater than unfiliality. The King of Xiang of Zhou had failed to serve his mother, and the Spring and Autumn annals had recorded his expulsion for it. The ancestral temple was weightier than the sovereign, and Liu He had never received his mandate in the temple of the founder; therefore he could not hold the succession, and ought to be deposed. The ministers asked that the proper officials prepare a sacrifice of the great offering and announce the deposition to the founder's temple. The empress dowager said: let it be so.
Huo Guang then told the king to rise and accept the decree. Liu He answered with a sentence from the Classic of Filial Piety: if the Son of Heaven has seven ministers who will argue with him, then even though he be without the Way he does not lose the empire. It was the reply of a man who still thought he was arguing a case. Huo Guang answered that the empress dowager had already decreed the deposition, and asked him how he could call himself Son of Heaven; then he took him by the hand, unfastened the seal and the cords from his person and carried them to the empress dowager, and helped him down from the hall and out of the Gold Horse Gate, with the ministers following to see him off. Liu He turned to the west, bowed, and said that he was stupid and unfit for the affairs of Han. Huo Guang accompanied him to the residence of the kingdom of Changyi, took his leave, and made an apology that is one of the strangest speeches the history preserves: your conduct has cut you off from the empire; we your servants have failed you, but we dare not fail the altars of the state; I hope that you will take care of yourself, and that I shall never see you again. Then he wept and went away.
What followed was the part the historians have found hardest to accept. The ministers proposed sending Liu He into distant exile at Fangling in Hanzhong, and the empress dowager — which is to say Huo Guang — instead sent him back to Changyi, with an allowance of two thousand households and with all his father's personal property, and gave each of his father's four daughters an allowance of a thousand households, and abolished the kingdom of Changyi, turning it into the commandery of Shanyang. The Changyi officials, meanwhile, were charged with having failed to guide and teach their king, and were sentenced to death. More than two hundred of them were executed; one later count says three hundred. As they were taken out, they cried to one another in the market so that people remembered it: decide when you must decide, or the disorder will fall on you instead. The Tang gloss on those words is that they were sorry they had not killed Huo Guang first.
Only the men who had argued with Liu He were spared, and only by a degree: Gong Sui and Wang Ji and the teacher Wang Shi had their sentences commuted for having reproved him so often. Wang Shi was asked at his hearing why he had never submitted a written remonstrance. He answered that he had taught the king the three hundred and five poems, and that when he came to the pieces about loyal ministers and filial sons he had never failed to rehearse them, and that when he came to the ruined kings who lost the Way he had never failed to rehearse those either, with tears on his face; he had remonstrated with the king by means of the Odes, and what did they mean by asking why he had no document? He kept his life and went home and stopped teaching, and became in time the standard of the age for the study of the poems. Gong Sui was sentenced to shave his head and work on the walls, and later, under Emperor Xuan, became the famous governor of Bohai who talked a province of armed men into selling their weapons and buying ploughs.
The second-century historian Xun Yue, writing his chronicle of the Former Han three hundred years after the event, put Liu He among the rulers he called lamentable — those in whom public and private pull against each other, who may just hold together when nothing goes wrong and will certainly be lost when something does. Su Shi, writing a thousand years later, was more direct: the deposition was already done, so why kill more than two hundred of his attendants? In his reading, some of those attendants must have been plotting against Huo Guang, and Huo Guang knew it, and that, and not the alleged licence, was why he deposed the boy. The record cannot settle the question. What it shows is a regent who moved the moment a young man began to staff the palace gates with his own people, and who spent the following months removing everyone who might have helped him do it again.

4. Shanyang

The kingdom was gone, and the man who had been its king was an ordinary subject of the empire, living in his father's old palace in Shanyang, in southwestern Shandong.
The court did not leave him alone, and the reason was not fear that he would be restored. It was fear that someone else would try. Emperor Xuan, who had been brought from a prison cell to the throne in the same year, kept an eye on his deposed predecessor for years. In 64 BC he sent the governor of Shanyang a sealed order to watch him and to keep the order secret. The answer he received is the single most valuable document about Liu He that survives, because it was written by a man who had actually looked at him and had no reason to flatter either side.
The governor was Zhang Chang, and his report of the autumn of 66 BC reads like a police description rather than a piece of court argument. The former king, he wrote, was twenty-six or twenty-seven years old. His complexion was dark, his eyes were small, his nose was pointed and low, his beard was thin. He was tall, he suffered from rheumatism and walked with difficulty, and he went about in a short jacket and wide trousers, with a scholar's cap on his head, a jade ring at his waist, a brush stuck in his hair and a bundle of wooden writing tablets carried in front of him. There were a hundred and eighty-three slaves in the palace. The great gate was kept shut and a small door left open; one honest servant was permitted to buy in the market and to bring in one meal a day. An officer of the watch patrolled the streets; guards hired with the old royal money looked out for bandits. Zhang Chang had been in several times to look.
Then he describes his own visit. He sat with Liu He in the courtyard and saw his wives and the slaves. He wanted to draw him out and see what was in his mind, so he began with a bird. He said that there were many owls in Changyi. And Liu He answered: yes, and when I travelled west to Chang'an there were none at all; when I came back east and reached Jiyang I heard the owls again. He noticed that Liu He's children were holding the reins and that Liu He, kneeling, explained that their mother was the daughter of a man called Yan Changsun, the chief of the capital police. And Zhang Chang's summary of the man, after all this, is four characters in Chinese and a verdict in any language: he was blank and foolish. He counted sixteen wives and twenty-two children, eleven of them sons. He sent the household register in with the rest.
The emperor read it, and concluded that Liu He was not dangerous, and in 63 BC made him a marquis. It is worth noticing what the report does not contain. The dossier of 74 BC had described a man who drove the imperial carriage after tigers and slept with his predecessor's women. Zhang Chang, who had every incentive to report anything alarming, describes a dull, ill, tall man of twenty-six, shut in the compound of a dead kingdom, whose conversation runs to birds; and the phrase he uses for his intelligence, the phrase on which the decision to let him live turns, is that he was empty.

5. The Marquis of Haihun

In the spring of 63 BC — the third year of Yuan Kang — Emperor Xuan issued the decree that made the deposed king a marquis, with a fief of four thousand households, in the commandery of Yuzhang, far to the south, on the low-lying country west of Lake Poyang. The name of the fief was Haihun, and it was not a compliment and not an insult; the words mean something like the sunset side of the lake. He was forbidden to come to the ancestral temples, which meant he was forbidden to come to the capital for the sacrifices: the one man of the imperial house who could not worship in the ancestral temple was also the one who could not be seen there.
He went south to take up the fief, and the man who went was now in his fourth identity. He had been born a king, he had been an emperor for twenty-seven days, he had spent eleven years as a subject of the empire in the ruins of his father's house, and he ended as a marquis.
The marquisate lasted four years, and the record of it is one incident. A few years after he took up the fief, the inspector of Yang province reported that Liu He had been in communication with Sun Wanshi, a former under-officer of the commandery. Sun Wanshi had asked him a question, evidently idly and evidently hoping to please: when you were deposed, why did you not stand firm and refuse to leave the palace, and cut down the general-in-chief, instead of letting them take the seal and cord off you? And Liu He answered: yes. I lost the moment. Sun Wanshi went further and said that the emperor would surely make him king of Yuzhang and that he would not stay a marquis long; and to this Liu He said: perhaps — but that is not a thing to be said. The exchange was reported, the officials investigated it and asked that he be arrested, and the emperor's decree was to cut three thousand households from his fief. What remained was a thousand households and a name.
He died in 59 BC, in the third year of Shen Jue, aged thirty-three by one count and thirty-four by another. The annals give no cause. He had been living under surveillance in the wet country of Yuzhang for four years, and his household allowance had just been cut by three quarters; there is no evidence about the end, and the reports that he died of illness or of anger are later summaries, not findings.
What happened to the title afterwards came out of the ground in the state's own words. His designated heirs died soon after him, and the governor of Yuzhang reported the deaths to the throne as a sign that heaven had decided to end the line; the fief was abolished. Then, under Emperor Yuan, in 46 BC, the title was revived and given to another of his sons, Liu Daizong, who was called the marquis of Haihun of the Li line, and whose descendants held it through the rest of the Western Han.

6. The Hill at Guodun

The tumulus lies on a low hill at the edge of a village, about an hour's drive north of Nanchang, in a district whose old name was Haihun. Under it, eight metres down, the tomb had been built as a palace in miniature, with a timber chamber divided by function — stores of coins, grain, wine vessels, musical instruments, weapons, documents, clothes — and over it the builders had piled seven metres of earth. The garden around it covered about four and a half hectares, and contained two principal tombs, seven subsidiary graves, a pit for chariots and horses, an enclosing wall with gate-towers, a hall for the tablet of the dead and another for making offerings, and a system of drains and paths. A kilometre away, the walled town that had been the seat of the marquisate covers about three and a half square kilometres, with water channels running through it.
The place lay under water, and that is why it survived. In AD 318 an earthquake in the province sank the district; the tomb chamber collapsed and filled, and the looters of later centuries could not work under water. There is a lamp in the shaft of an old robber's tunnel, left there by men who came down from the mound above and went away empty-handed. What nearly finished the tomb in the end was the modern trade. In March 2011 villagers reported a gang that had rented a house, worked at night and left lights flickering on the hill. The police seized them; and when the excavators got there they found that the robbers had driven their shaft down almost fifteen metres from the top of the mound and struck the exact centre of the burial chamber — which, because the tomb was built as a set of rooms rather than a single airtight box, was empty. They had missed the dead man by the width of one of his rooms.
The rescue excavation went on for five years, and by the end of it the mound had produced more than ten thousand objects, and the identification of the dead man came in stages.
The evidence that identified him was a set of documents and a seal. In the chamber were copies of memorials he had sent to the throne, on wooden tablets, bearing the phrase "your servant He" and the words "Haihun, marquis of the southern frontier, your servant He, dying ten thousand deaths, bows again to the emperor"; one of them carries the date of the sixth month of the fourth year of Yuan Kang, which is 62 BC, a year after he took the fief. And from the same chamber came gold cakes inscribed in ink with the words "the gold offered for the libation, one catty, the third year of Yuan Kang" — the yearly tribute a marquis owed the ancestral temple, here the payment for 63 BC, the year he took the fief. And in the inner coffin, at the place where his waist had been, the excavators found a jade seal cut with two characters: Liu He.
The rest of what the tomb held is best described by what a marquis was supposed to have and by what the tomb-makers evidently thought he was entitled to. In the coffin room were three sets of suspended instruments — two arrays of bronze bells and an array of stone chimes, with thirty-six figures of musicians and dancers and a set of stringed and wind instruments. There was a pit west of the principal tomb containing five wooden chariots with the traces of twenty horses and more than three thousand fittings, all of them inlaid or gilded — the only chariot burial of real vehicles and real animals yet found anywhere south of the Yangzi. The chamber held some two million five-zhu coins, minted under Emperors Wu, Zhao and Xuan and none later, weighing in total more than ten tonnes, stacked in the coin store so that the heap stood nearly a metre and a half high. The gold was in the four forms the Han minted — cakes, plates, and the horse-hoof and qilin-toe pieces that Emperor Wu had struck after a portent in 95 BC and that only the emperor could confer — and it weighed in all about a hundred and fifteen kilograms. And it held, in the western room — the room that in a tomb arranged as a house corresponds to the hall where a man receives his guests — a lacquered mirror on a wooden stand whose back is painted with a group of figures and inscribed with their names: a tall man in a small cap, a deep robe, a belt at the waist and upturned shoes, with a long beard, and around him his disciples, among them Yan Hui, and among the inscribed names that of his father. The painted figures were only found because a hyperspectral scanner was brought to bear on what had looked like a plain surface; the man is Confucius, and the inscription beside him says that he was born in the countryside and lived in a mean lane. It is the earliest painting of Confucius known, and it may stand in for two lost scrolls of portraits of the Master and his disciples that the catalogue of the History of Han lists.
The tomb also contained a library. The excavators recovered more than five thousand bamboo slips and about a hundred and eighty wooden tablets, and once they had been cleaned and read the collection turned out to be an upper-class education in the classics of the Confucian canon: the Odes, the Rites, the Changes, the Spring and Autumn, the Classic of Filial Piety, and the Analects. Two of these finds belong to the history of books rather than to the history of one man. The Analects turns out to belong to the Qi recension, the version read in the old kingdom of Qi and lost since before the Tang; and it contains a chapter, called Knowing the Way, that had been lost for some eighteen hundred years. The Odes slips preserve more of the text than any earlier manuscript. There are also medical texts, a lament for the dead, and a text on the board game called liubo.
Taken together, the grave shows a man of property, learning and taste; and the very first thing modern readers want to do with it is to overturn the dossier of 74 BC. That move has been made, and it should be resisted at least in part. The director of the excavation puts the case as strongly as anyone: that the picture of a dissolute king does not hold up, and that the deposed emperor was probably undone by a misjudgement of the court's politics and by showing his hand too early. The chair of the archaeological panel that examined the tomb said that the objects show a well-educated man, remembered in the History of Han in an image of a scholar holding tablets with a brush in his hair — which is precisely how Zhang Chang had described him. But the historian Xu Weimin has pointed out the limit of the argument: the fashion of the later Western Han upper class was Confucian, and a nobleman's tomb is furnished according to fashion as well as to taste; books in a grave prove that books were buried in it, not that the man read them.
The argument about rank cuts both ways too. In the things the rules did specify, the tomb is correct. It has no great chamber of piled cypress heartwood, the outward form of an imperial tomb, and no jade suit of the kind the emperor and the kings of the first rank wore; the regulations were obeyed. But where the rules were silent, the tomb filled the silence. The Rites of Zhou assigns to a lord three sides of bells and chimes against four for the emperor; the tomb has three. A marquis was not entitled to real chariots and real horses in his grave — the practice was abolished in 33 BC, and among the marquises of Haihun only Liu He died before that year, which is one of the reasons the excavators suspected whose tomb they were opening before they found the seal. A marquis was not entitled to ten ding; the tomb has ten. He lay on a mat of glass plaques strung on gold wire above a hundred gold cakes laid out in twenty rows of five, a floor that would have looked like the floor of a treasury. The tomb is, in short, the burial of a marquis who did everything a marquis might do, and nothing a marquis might not, using every space the law left him. That is a fair description of a man who had been a king and an emperor and had to die a marquis.
The state's own account of the end of the line came out of the same ground, and it is the last document of this story. Among the wooden tablets the readers found the draft of an edict abolishing the marquisate, carrying the names of nineteen ministers and describing the whole process by which the fief was extinguished after its lord died. It is the sort of paper that official history summarises in a clause, and here it is whole, with the signatures on it: the machinery of the Han state working out in ordinary administrative language the extinction of a title it had itself created. It also gives the dates of the death and the burial.

7. The File and the Grave

Two portraits of the same man came out of the same empire, and they do not look like each other.
The first was made in 74 BC by the men who needed to remove him. It has him driving the imperial carriage after wild animals, eating roast meat in the mourning hall, lying with the late emperor's women, and issuing eleven hundred and twenty-seven requisitions in twenty-seven days; it ends with a young man of eighteen or nineteen saying, as the seal is taken off his wrist, that he is stupid and unfit for the affairs of Han. Almost everything in it is true in the sense that a prosecutor's brief is true: the events happened in the way an indictment would want them to be read, and the file was drawn by men with the strongest possible interest in the reading. Nobody has ever demonstrated that a single clause of it is false, or shown that any clause of it was tested.
The second was made between 63 BC and the man's death, by a household furnishing a grave for a provincial marquis. It has him lying on a bed of gold with a mat of glass, surrounded by bells and chimes and musicians and a library of the classics, with a mirror near him whose back is Confucius; it ends by putting a jade seal with his name at his waist. Nothing in it is a claim about the twenty-seven days, and everything in it is a claim about status: a man who was entitled to very little and arranged to have all of it. There is no reason to believe it is any more candid than the dossier. A tomb is a public statement a family makes about itself, and it is exactly as interested a document as a memorial of impeachment.
The one text that falls outside both and was not written in a court is Zhang Chang's report from Shanyang, and it is worth returning to because it is where the man almost becomes visible. Zhang Chang went to look at the deposed emperor on the emperor's orders, and he found a tall, dark, rheumatic man of twenty-six with a thin beard and a scholar's cap, who walked badly and came forward holding a bundle of writing tablets; who lived shut inside a wall with one servant allowed out for food; who could be drawn into a conversation only about owls; and about whom the strongest thing the governor could bring himself to say was that he was blank and foolish. That is not the portrait of a monster, and it is not the portrait of a sage. It is the portrait of a man who had been emperor for twenty-seven days at eighteen and had then been kept in a box for eleven years with nothing to do but marry and eat, and whom two different governments found it useful, in different ways, to describe as something other than ordinary.
That is the shape of the case, and the archaeology cannot make it go away. What the tomb did was not to acquit Liu He; there was no trial to reopen and the crimes alleged were political, so evidence about them would not be in a grave. What the tomb did was to change the man on the other side of the ledger — so that the deposed emperor of 74 BC is now a person who copied the Analects off a rare recension, who had ten ding he was not entitled to and a set of bells the Rites allowed a lord, who owed the ancestral temple his yearly tribute and paid it in gold cakes, and who looked at Confucius every morning while he dressed. Whether that makes him a better man than the file says is not a question the evidence answers; people keep mirrors and books for reasons other than merit. But it does mean that the single most quoted fact about him, the one thousand one hundred and twenty-seven, is now competing with a second set of facts, and the second set was not drafted by the man who took his seal.
There is one sentence in his own voice from the years after the fall, and it is the sentence that fits him best. When the old under-officer Sun Wanshi invited him to say, years too late, that he should have stood fast in the palace and cut down the general-in-chief, and then suggested that the throne would yet come back to him, Liu He answered: perhaps — but that is not a thing to be said. He was thirty-odd, in a wet country on the edge of the empire, with a thousand households and a surveillance officer and a fief he had not asked for; and what he said, when a man who wanted something from him tried to draw him out, was to be careful what he said. It is the only line of his own that the record preserves in full from those years, and it is the line of a man who had learned what it cost to say the wrong thing to the wrong person. The historiography of the Western Han remembered him as an emperor who could not stop doing it. The archaeology of his grave remembers a man who had stopped.