Ruzi Ying

The edict that ended the Western Han gave it twelve generations and two hundred and ten years. It also had, for rather less than three of those years, a figure at the head of the state who was never an emperor at all. His name was Liu Ying, and the title the court gave him was not an imperial one. He was the Crown Prince, and the word used for him in every document of the period was Ruzi — the Child.
The word was chosen with care, because it was an argument. Ruzi is an old and ordinary term for a young person, and the men who took it up in AD 6 were pointing at a precedent: the boy king Cheng of Zhou had been called ruzi while the Duke of Zhou governed for him, and the arrangement now proposed was that this regency would end the same way — that the child would grow up, and the government would be given back. Nearly everyone involved understood that this was a fiction. What belongs to the record is that the fiction was told about a child, and that the child, of all the people in it, was the one who was never asked anything. He left no decisions and no words that can be shown to be his own. What the sources preserve of him is a birth year, a father, a title, an edict read over him, and a room.

1. The Crown Prince Who Was Not an Emperor

He was born in AD 5, the son of Liu Xian, marquis of Guangqi, and through his father a great-great-grandson of Emperor Xuan. The Guangqi title belonged to a cadet branch of the imperial line that had come down through the kings of Chu and then into the marquisates, well away from the throne. His father held a small fief and a place in the provincial nobility, and nothing about the household he was born into suggested that a child from it would be present at the end of a dynasty.
The death of Emperor Ping in the first weeks of AD 6 left the Western Han without an heir, and the choice of what to do about it was made by the man who had the government in his hands; the account of that choice belongs to the reign before this one. What matters here is what it made of the boy: he was not made emperor. He was given the title Ruzi — the Child — and he was made crown prince.
He was not made emperor, and the distinction was not a formality. To enthrone the boy would have begun a reign: an era name of his own, a court, a coming of age that the government would be obliged to name and to meet. To leave him crown prince kept the throne formally attached to the dead Emperor Ping and the government formally in the hands of a regent, which was where Wang Mang needed it to stay. For two years and nine months — from the spring of AD 6 to the twelfth month of AD 8 — the head of the Han state was a child who had never sat on its throne.
The regency then took shape under an era name that said out loud what it was — Jushe, the Regency, whose first year was AD 6 — and its vocabulary is the clearest surviving evidence of what had actually happened. Wang Mang wore the ceremonial dress of the Son of Heaven; he sat facing south to receive the court; his journeys were cleared ahead and closed behind him as an emperor's were; officials and commoners addressed him with the forms due to a sovereign. The compromise was carried in the names. At the sacrifices in the suburbs and in the ancestral halls, the History of Han says, the officiant who pronounced the blessing addressed him as the Acting Emperor; the officials and the people called him the Regent Emperor — the word meant one who acts in another's place; he called himself yu, the first person that a ruler used for himself; and his decisions went out in the form of an emperor's decrees. The one piece of subjecthood left to him was the audience: when he went in to the grand empress dowager, or to the widow of the emperor he had buried, he was a subject again.
Against this apparatus the crown prince had no part at all in the government. He had a tutor, an establishment and a palace; every document that survives from those years is a document of Wang Mang's administration, issued in Wang Mang's voice and under Wang Mang's name. The boy's function was to make the regency a regency. He was kept at the age that made the argument work — old enough to be an heir, young enough to be governed.

2. The Regency Under Arms

His title was contested from its first spring. In the fourth month of AD 6, the month after the crown prince was installed, a marquis of the imperial house, Liu Chong of Anzhong, and his chancellor Zhang Shao gathered a hundred-odd men and tried to seize the city of Wan. It was a small attempt and it failed at the wall, and the History of Han records its suppression in a few lines. But it was the first time a member of the family itself had taken up arms, and the argument it made could not be put back: in the words the history puts in their mouths, the regent controlled the government and would endanger the house of Liu, and no one had dared to be first.
A year and a half later came the rising that nearly ended the regency. In the ninth month of AD 7 the governor of Dongjun, Zhai Yi — a son of the Zhai Fangjin who had been chancellor under Emperor Cheng — used the autumn muster of his commandery to turn its troops westward against the capital. He had prepared more than soldiers. He proclaimed a clansman, the marquis of Yanxiang, Liu Xin, as Son of Heaven; he took for himself the office of Grand Marshal and the title Pillar-of-Heaven General, and named a chancellor and a censor-general; and he sent a proclamation through the commanderies of the east. The commanderies wavered. By the time his force reached Shanyang it was said to number more than a hundred thousand. And in the capital's own hinterland, at Huaili west of Chang'an, two men, Zhao Ming and Huo Hong, raised a second rising of comparable size, burned government offices, came near enough that the glare of their fires was seen at the front hall of the Weiyang Palace.
Wang Mang's first response was not military. The History of Han says that he was afraid and could not eat, and that he carried the child in his arms, day and night, while he prayed at the suburban altars and the ancestral temples. He then did something more useful: he had his secretaries compose a proclamation modelled on the Great Announcement of the Duke of Zhou — the document in which the Duke had justified his own regency to a suspicious world — and had it circulated through the empire. Its promise was the promise the child's title had always implied: that the regent held the government only until the boy came of age, and would then return it. He sent his generals east with it, Sun Jian and Wang Yi among them.
The campaign took a season. In the tenth month the government army broke the rebels at Zai in Chenliu and killed Liu Xin's brother, the marquis of Wuping. In the twelfth month it caught the main body at Yuxian and destroyed it; Zhai Yi and Liu Xin broke out of the ring, and Zhai Yi was taken in Runan and executed by dismemberment, while Liu Xin disappeared from the record. Only the rising at Huaili held out into the following spring, and it was crushed in the second month of AD 8. What followed the fighting was a settlement by terror. Zhai Yi's kin to the third degree were killed; his father's coffin, long buried, was dug up and burned; the bodies of the leaders were displayed at five places along the roads. At the White Tiger Hall in Chang'an, Wang Mang feasted the returning generals and enfeoffed three hundred and ninety-five of them.
Two things are worth setting beside each other. The men who risked everything to save the Han did not do it for the boy in the palace: Zhai Yi's candidate for the throne was a different clansman, and the child Wang Mang held was useful to neither side, since a loyalist could not rally to him without rallying to the regency that stood behind him. And the proclamation Wang Mang sent through the empire in that year promised in writing to give the government back when the child came of age. Ten months after the last rising was put down, he stopped waiting.

3. The Casket and the Duke

The end came the way the regency had begun, with a sign dug out of the ground. In the last year of the regency a post-station chief at Linzi in the east reported a dream: a messenger of Heaven had told him that the Regent Emperor was to become the true one, and had promised that a well would appear in the station. A well was found, some seventy feet deep. Then a man of Zitong named Ai Zhang prepared a copper casket with two labels, one inscribed as the Golden Casket Chart of the Seal of the Emperor of Heaven, the other as the Golden Book by which the Red Emperor transmitted the empire to the Yellow Emperor — that is, by which the patron of the Han handed it to the patron of the Wang. Inside was a text naming Wang Mang as the true Son of Heaven and listing the ministers of his new government. Ai Zhang carried the casket, dressed in yellow, at dusk to the ancestral temple of the Han, and gave it to the officer on duty.
Wang Mang went to the temple to receive it with reverence — a Han minister taking an oracle out of the Han's own shrine — and then sat in the front hall of the Weiyang Palace and issued the edict that took the true imperial position for himself and gave his dynasty the name Xin, the New. Two of the men named in the casket's list of ministers were found and appointed: one, Wang Xing, had been a clerk at a city gate, and the other, Wang Sheng, sold pancakes; their faces were held to match a physiognomist's reading, so they were brought straight from their trades to be generals and marquises. And he declared the twelfth month of that year — January of AD 9 by the Western calendar — to be the first month of a new era, Jianguo. In that month the Western Han ended.
On the first day of that month Wang Mang, at the head of the nobles and officials, carried the Han's seals up to the grand empress dowager, went along with the talisman decree, and removed the Han name. Then he dealt with the child. The edict he read over him was composed in the language of the classics: "You, Ying: formerly August Heaven aided your great ancestor; through twelve generations he held the state for two hundred and ten years. The calendar has come to Our person. We enfeoff you as Duke of Ding'an, forever to be the guest of the house of Xin." The boy was given a fief of five counties in the east — Pingyuan, Ande, Luoyin, Ge and Zhongqiu, in what is now western Shandong — ten thousand households and a hundred li of land, with the ancestral temple of the Han to be kept in it and its sacrifices maintained, and with a rank beside that of the descendants of Zhou, the earlier dynasty the Han itself had pensioned. The little state was to keep the Han's own calendar and its ceremonial colours, so that the ancestors of a fallen house could still be given their proper seasons. The widow of Emperor Ping, who was Wang Mang's own daughter, was made Dowager of Ding'an.
Then came the scene the History of Han reports in full. The edict finished, Wang Mang took the child's hand, wept, sobbed, and said: "When the Duke of Zhou held the regency he was able, in the end, to restore the government to the son. I alone am pressed by the awe-inspiring command of August Heaven, and cannot do as I wish." He sighed for a long while. The boy's tutor led him down from the hall; he turned to the north and declared himself a subject; and the assembled officials, the history says, were moved. The words of the abdication and the tears of the man taking the throne belong to the same hour: the child was told he was a guest, and the man who had made him one said he regretted it.
He was not the only member of his family being dealt with. In the same months the new government took the imperial clan apart: the Han's twenty-two kings were reduced to dukes and its hundred and eighty-one lesser peerages to viscountcies, and the members of the Liu family who held provincial governorships were recalled to the capital and given the rank of consultants instead. Within a few years even those noble titles were gone. The Duke of Ding'an, kept in the capital beside a temple he would never visit, was the household in which the policy was most complete.
The fief was real, and he was never sent to it. The edict that gave him five counties and a temple gave him instead a house inside Chang'an: the old office of the grand herald, converted into the residence of the Duke of Ding'an, with gate guards and an officer of the court to keep watch over it. And then the History of Han adds its coldest sentence. "He ordered the nurse and the attendants not to speak with him; he stayed always within the four walls; when he was grown he could not name the six domestic animals." Six domestic animals: the horse, the ox, the sheep, the fowl, the dog, the pig — the first vocabulary of any farming household, and the boy who had been the Han's crown prince never learned it. In time Wang Mang married him to his own granddaughter, a daughter of Wang Yu, the son he had forced to kill himself years before; the marriage changed nothing about the room. The other young person left over from the dynasty took a different road. The widow of Emperor Ping had been made Dowager of Ding'an; when her father tried to marry her again and changed her title to free her, she beat the attendants around her, took to her bed, and stayed there.

4. Linjing

Nearly fifteen years passed in that house. In AD 23 the armies that had risen against Wang Mang broke into Chang'an and killed him, and the man they had made their emperor, Liu Xuan, known to the sources as the Gengshi Emperor, took the capital. The prisoner of the Ding'an residence was then about eighteen. He was one of the few people in the palace quarter whom the change did not kill. He had spent more than half his life behind a watched gate; he was now a man with a fief he had never seen, a wife he had not chosen, and almost no experience of the world outside his walls. He was left where he was.
Two years later a man decided to make use of him. Fang Wang was a scholar of Pingling who had served the warlord Wei Xiao in the far west as a strategist and had left him when he chose to submit to the Gengshi court; he had concluded that the Gengshi government was going to fall. He put the case to Gong Lin of Anling: "The former Duke of Ding'an, Ying, is a descendant of Emperor Ping; though Wang Mang usurped, he was once the lord of the Han. Everyone now says the house of Liu are the true men and are to receive the mandate again. Why should we not make a great name for ourselves?" The argument rested on a title the boy had never held — he had been crown prince, never emperor — and that did not matter. They went to Chang'an, brought him out, and set him up at Linjing, a town in the far north-west, with several thousand followers; Fang Wang became his chancellor and Gong Lin his grand marshal.
The Gengshi Emperor sent his chancellor Li Song and a general, Su Mao, against Linjing. The rising was small and it was over quickly: the town was taken, and Liu Ying, Fang Wang and Gong Lin were all beheaded. The History of the Later Han gives it in a single line. It happened in the first month of AD 25 — the same year in which, in the sixth month, a different descendant of the house of Liu, Liu Xiu, took the imperial title and began the restoration that would be called the Eastern Han. The last nominal sovereign of the Western Han was killed in a frontier town by the officers of the regime that had briefly carried the Han's name.
No history records where he was buried. What the Han's own annals preserve of him is a birth year, a father, a title, less than three years as crown prince on a throne he never sat on, an edict read over him, and a room. He is remembered for none of the things that make a reign — no policy, no campaign, no judgement — because he was never in a position to make any of them. Everything done in his name was done by men who needed the name, and when the name stopped being useful it was taken away and replaced with a wall. A dynasty that had lasted two hundred and ten years ended, in the record, not with a last stand but with a child who had been kept so carefully from the world that he could not tell a horse from a dog, and who was finally killed, in the year the Han started again, by the people who had brought the Han back.