Marquis of Liangning

In the family chapter of the Jinshu, the whole of Zhang Yaoling's accession is one sentence. It gives his style name, Yuanshu; his age, ten; the bare fact that he took over the affairs of the province; and four titles. Nothing happens in the sentence. There is no enthronement, no amnesty, no audience, no change of the year count, and no embassy from any other court. A boy was handed a government in the space of a clause, and the clause is the whole of his public life.
Twenty months later he was taken to the Eastern Garden at Guzang, and killed there, and put in a sand pit. In between he had been a duke for about a month and a marquis for the rest, and he had never commanded a soldier, issued an order, or sat in a council that decided anything. The men who kept his file served the men who deposed him and then the men who avenged him, and neither party had a reason to make him complicated. The question worth asking is therefore not why he was powerless. It is why a person with no power at all still had to be entered in the sequence.

1. The Heir

Zhang Chonghua died at Guzang in the eleventh month of 353, on its eighteenth day. A month earlier, when it was clear he would not recover, he had his son made heir and had the province pardoned for it. The son was ten years old.
The figure can be trusted, because two histories that agree on nothing else agree on it: the family chapter says ten, and the Weishu — no friend to this family — says ten as well. It is the Chinese count, which takes the year of birth as the first, so he was eight or nine by the western count. The record never gives a birth year, and any conversion from the age at accession is an inference rather than a fact.
His mother is not named. The woman who acts in his story is his grandmother, Lady Ma, Zhang Chonghua's mother, who held the rank of queen dowager and the palace of Eternal Longevity. Several later tables give her to the boy as his mother; that is a confusion of one generation. Of his brothers the record names one, Zhang Xuanjing, whom it calls his younger half-brother. It never numbers Yaoling among Chonghua's sons and never says he was the eldest. He was the heir, and in this house that was a decision before it was a birth order.
What he took on the eighteenth was the bundle his father had carried before the royal title: grand marshal, colonel protecting the Qiang, governor of Liangzhou, duke of Xiping. The list stops at duke. In 346 the officials had given his father the acting kingship of Liang along with everything else; in 353 nobody proposed it for the son, and he did not take it. Nor did he take a year of his own. The documents of his government were dated, as the province's documents had been for four decades, in the forty-first year of Jianxing — an era name issued for five years and used for forty-one.
The government he inherited was not empty. It was full of men, and none of them answered to him. The right long secretary, Zhao Chang, held the chancery, which is to say the office in which a ruler's intention becomes an order. Wei Ji, a palace favourite of his father's, held access. His father's elder half-brother, the marquis of Changning, held no post the record names at the moment of the death and was the most dangerous man in the palace. The strongest commander outside the capital was Zhang Guan at Fuhan on the Yellow River; the cavalry in the capital was under Song Hun. A week's ride west, at Jiuquan, sat Xie Ai, the one commander who had beaten a northern army in the field and the one man the court had been glad to post out of the way. The boy had a household, a title, and a grandmother.

2. Two Papers

The first paper appeared within days of the death. Zhao Chang and Wei Ji brought out a testament attributed to the dead ruler, and the chapter states the forgery outright. It made Zhang Zuo supervisor of all armies at home and abroad, commissioner with the staff, general of the pacifying army, and regent. Both men had been Zhang Chonghua's confidants before they became Zhang Zuo's sworn brothers, and the instrument they used was the one they were employed to handle: a single sheet with a dead man's authority on it. It succeeded because no second copy existed and no officer in the province had the standing to dispute a seal.
There had been a real order, and the forgery was written to occupy the space it would have filled. On the tenth of the eleventh month, eight days before he died, Zhang Chonghua wrote out an order in his own hand naming Xie Ai to the regency, with the rank of guard general and supervision of the armies at court and in the provinces. The two men through whom any order had to pass took it and did not proclaim it. Xie Ai was at Jiuquan, and he was dead before the year ended.
The difference between the two papers is not authenticity. It is publicity. One was published and one was not, and in a government with no procedure for publication, authenticity is settled by whoever is standing in the room when the seal is pressed.
The accession itself is the sentence quoted at the beginning. There was no ceremony, because the titles came to him by succession and there was nothing new to confer. The acts that fill a ruler's first week — appointments, pardons, receptions, sacrifices — are recorded for his father and not for him. The one rite attached to him came before he ruled, when his father had him made heir and had the province pardoned for it, and that was his father's act, done to him rather than by him.
For a month the government ran. It ran through the chancery, and the chancery belonged to Zhao Chang. It ran through the palace, and the palace belonged to Wei Ji and the dowager. It ran in the province, and the province belonged to its garrison commanders. The one thing the boy owned was the date. Every document issued in the last weeks of 353 was issued in the forty-first year of Jianxing and under his name, because a document needs a year and a year needs a ruler. That is not nothing. It is the whole of what he had.

3. The Twelfth Month

In the twelfth month Zhao Chang and Wei Ji put the proposal. The times were not yet quiet, a child could not be asked to hold them, and the house should set up an older man. The argument was the ordinary one for a minority, and nobody in the hall needed it explained. What was not ordinary was the speed, and the fact that the older man was already in the palace.
The order came from Lady Ma. The chapter puts one sentence in front of it: Zhang Zuo had taken Lady Ma, his own father's concubine and the boy's grandmother, as his wife. The explanation may be the reason or it may be the story the file tells about the reason; the form of the deed is the same either way. It was issued by the one person in Guzang whose authority over the child was not a matter of troops — his father's mother — and it was issued as a command, in one verb. She ordered him deposed, and the uncle took the office.
There is no scene. That is the first thing to say about the deposition, because a reader expects one: a hall, an officer with a document, a boy asked to stand aside. The chapter gives the proposal, the order and the result, and it gives no assembly, no reading, no witness and no reply. In the whole of his notice Zhang Yaoling is not quoted once. He is the object of two verbs — he was set up, he was deposed — and the only words anyone says about him are the ones that open the argument: that he is young. An order was given, a title changed, and the person whose title it was never appears as the subject of a clause.
The men who had spoken plainly to his father were not there to speak for him. Xie Ai was at Jiuquan, and the order that would have made him regent never left the palace. Suo Xia, who had argued the court out of a campaign in 347, is not heard of after 348; whether he was in the hall that month is not preserved.
He became marquis of Liangning. The title is one syllable away from the marquisate his uncle had carried, Changning, and the Ming-era reconstruction of Cui Hong's lost chronicle reverses the syllables and gives the fief as Ningliang, which suggests that the name had already stopped pointing at a place for the men who copied it. The record does not say where he lived after the twelfth month. It does not say who stayed with him, whether he kept a household, or whether anyone told him what had been done. The next time it names him, twenty months later, he is being taken to a garden.

4. The Eastern Garden

In the summer of 355 the commander of Hezhou, Zhang Guan, refused to be replaced and sent a proclamation through the province declaring the ruler deposed and the marquis of Liangning restored — the rank his deposer had given him, and the only one he had.
Zhang Zuo answered by sending an officer named Yang Qiuhu to the Eastern Garden with the boy. The family chapter says that Yang harmed him there and that the body was put in a sand pit; the Zizhi Tongjian, working the same material, supplies the manner: he broke his waist and killed him. The verb is la, the word for pulling a thing apart. Neither account says he was tortured first, and neither gives him a last sentence. The record does not explain why the garden was chosen; it says only that the boy was brought there.
He was twelve by the count that had made him ten in 353.
The name he was given was Ai, and it was given privately. The word the chapter uses means that the name came from the man who ordered the death and not from a court, and the rank attached to it was duke — the rank he had held for a month, conferred back on him by the man who had taken it away.
The date is the eighth month of 355 in the family chapter and in the Mirror. The annals of the Eastern Jin emperor have it otherwise: they give the death of the governor, the succession and the murder in a single entry for the tenth month of 353, with the usurpation in the same breath. The difference is not a dispute about a day. It is the difference between a province's file and a capital's. From Jiankang a governor had died and a usurper had appeared; the interval in which a child held the title was not visible from that distance and had no reason to be recorded. The biography's twenty months are the better account, because the biography had the documents. The annal's single entry is the better measure of what the reign looked like from outside.
He died first: his uncle was killed in the intercalary month that followed, and the two deaths have been told as one event ever since, though the record is unambiguous about the order.

5. The Name in the File

Three names have been attached to him and they do not agree. The family chapter and the Mirror both say that the private name was Ai and the rank duke. The chronological tables that descend from the Ming reconstruction give him Ai as a king. A third set of tables, and much of the modern literature that copies them, give him Chong — but Chong is the name of his younger half-brother Zhang Xuanjing, and the two boys are swapped in exactly this detail with some regularity. There is no record of a name conferred by the Jin court, which had never had occasion to hear of him while he was alive, and no record of a later ruler of the house giving him one. The strongest statement the evidence supports is that the only name he had after death was the one his killer chose, and that later hands promoted it by a grade.
No tomb is recorded for him, and no later hand supplies one.
The thinness has causes. A ruler of one month who never commanded troops, never issued an edict and never left the palace has no public acts to date. What an annalist can enter is what has a day attached to it: an accession, a demotion, a killing. Everything else — what the boy was taught, who spoke to him, whether he understood what had happened — belonged to the household, and the household's papers did not outlast the men who destroyed it. The chapter that contains him was assembled in the seventh century, at imperial order, from the state histories of the house; and those histories had passed, in the end, through the officials who served the usurper and then through the officials who killed him. Neither set had an interest in a boy with a character.
The name itself shows the wear. The family chapter writes it with one graph, the Weishu and the Mirror with another, and the Ming reconstruction transposes the two syllables and calls him Lingyao.
The larger question is not why the file is short. It is why the succession failed here, and the answer is not that the house had no rule. It had two, and it had used both within living memory: a brother followed a brother in 320, a nephew an uncle in 324, a son a father in 346. And in 346 the province went to a son of sixteen who was not the eldest, because his father had named him and the officers agreed. Nobody called that a usurpation, and it was not one.
That is the precedent that mattered, and the one nobody cites. In 346 designation beat seniority; in 353 seniority beat designation. On both occasions the decision was made by the same small group of officers, and on neither occasion was it made by a rule. What changed in 353 was that the two explanations pointed at different men at the same time, in public, and the man with the better claim had no troops. That is the point at which the house's constitution stopped being a habit and became a competition.
Here the question at the beginning can be answered. Zhang Yaoling has no annals. The Jinshu does not give this family annals at all: it files them among the biographies of loyal governors, and inside that file he has a short passage between his father's life and his uncle's. He is there because three parties needed him to have been there. The annalist needed a person to attach the forty-first year of Jianxing to, since a year without a ruler is not a year. The uncle needed a predecessor, because a man who takes an office from nobody is not a regent or a usurper but merely a man with troops. And the officers who marched in 355 needed a lawful ruler to restore, which is why their proclamation used the title the uncle had given him. A record that deleted him would have to delete the year, the crime and the cause.
None of this makes him a martyr, and the record does not present him as one. He was a child in a house where the office had already stopped protecting the person who held it, and the men who used his name used it because it was the only name available. What he actually had was a month, a title, a garden and a pit.
The sentence with which this article began is one sentence long. The rest of his life in the record is other people's verbs.